City of Dark Magic (14 page)

SEVENTEEN

C
harlotte Yates was not enjoying her trip to Venice. Even staying within the gilded confines of the Cipriani, she had still caught sight of the giant cruise ships that were pumping an endless stream of addictive euros into the blackened veins of the dying city. Personally, she felt the whole place should be bulldozed into the ocean. History should be studied but not worshipped. As to whether it should be exploited for profit, well, that was a matter of taste, not legislation.

Of course she was in a bad mood after the way Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti had handled what should have been a very small favor. Some months ago, in a rendezvous at the George V in Paris that did not appear on any official schedule, Charlotte had offered Elisa a present: an Aztec amulet that contained a vial filled with a nearly undetectable form of strychnine. It was darling Yuri who had given Charlotte the amulet and informed her of the poison the vial contained: a special little concoction the KGB had invented. Yuri had meant it to be protection, in case her secret was ever discovered. A gesture of 1" de" face="love. Fortunately, she had never needed to use it. Giving it to Elisa had felt poetic—not only because the amulet had been stolen from Elisa’s own family, but also because it was like Yuri was reaching out from the past to help her.

Charlotte had presented Elisa with the amulet as a pledge of their friendship, and with the promise that she would move heaven and earth to see the marchesa’s rightful fortune returned to her. All Elisa had to do in return was put a drop or two of the vial’s contents into the glass of a person Charlotte referred to as “a very bad man.” There was no reason to tell the marchesa that the bad man was a major Republican donor who was strongly against the party choosing Charlotte as their next presidential candidate. He and Elisa would both be attending the Save Venice fund-raiser; she could do it easily then. The party would be crowded, the contents of the vial untraceable, the man would die of an apparent cardiac arrest, nothing could be more natural and simple.

Asking this of Elisa was standard operating procedure: If you wanted to make someone loyal, implicate them in something that could prove very sticky should it come to light.

And the marchesa had done what was requested, but she had grossly overstepped her orders and created a ridiculous clusterfuck, putting the poison in the champagne fountain, where, diluted, it apparently caused its victims to hallucinate that they were on fire before killing them. That little side effect was unexpected, but not entirely surprising. The KGB had a strange sense of humor.

Now Charlotte wondered if Elisa wouldn’t be better off disposed of in some discreet way. Well, not yet. The marchesa still had her uses.

Charlotte’s team had done an excellent job of mopping up the mess over at the Ca’ Rezzonico. Thanks to some well-placed evidence planting, it was now clear that Al Qaeda operatives had put a form of strychnine in the champagne fountain, killing the seven guests and one tippling waiter at the Save Venice fund-raiser. One of the lovely things about operating in Italy was the culture’s universal embrace of the conspiracy theory. Thus, when it was quickly uncovered that the magistrates had been bribed to leak covert Arabic chat room chatter, no one was surprised at all, and the wild accusations that followed, though they included “massive coverup by the U.S. government,” and “CIA assassination,” also found evidence to support Iranian, Israeli, Russian, Chinese, Mafia, German, communist, and Martian involvement. It was really too easy, Charlotte thought. Especially with Al Qaeda so delighted to accept responsibility for knocking off the American president’s biggest campaign contributor and other assorted infidels. She hated giving terrorists the gift of publicity, but it couldn’t be helped. Only Al Qaeda took pride in wholesale slaughter of innocents.

Now that Venice was resolved, there was the news from Prague to deal with. These researchers were so painfully slow! No wonder American universities were in such bad shape—not only were they cesspools of liberalism, but they were populated by people who couldn’t even get simple tasks done. Unpack, catalog, locate, record, store—it was basic librarian stuff, for God’s sake. The Nazis had cataloged every piece of Lobkowicz treasure in a couple of months. The communists had taken longer and not been as thorough, which was not surprising. But that was convenient for everyone.

Restitution was such an absurd idea, Charlotte thought. Only that
playwright
Havel would come up with such an idea. Not that Charlotte didn’t love the theater, but intellectuals hatelch d no place in government. They didn’t have the stomach for it. Did no one read
Hamlet
anymore? It was all spelled out in black and white: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Too much thinking had been the downfall of many American presidents, but it wasn’t going to be hers.

Several problems had surfaced in the past forty-eight hours.

From Miles’s latest report, the Weston girl had stumbled across a note from Friedrich Gottlieb making some noise about missing items from Nela. Gottlieb! She had forgotten about him. An odious little troglodyte. But her cigarette case and the Aztec amulet were mentioned. Charlotte was increasingly suspicious of Miles. He was such an . . . academic. He might get very uppity about the letters. Miles was her watcher inside the palace, and it would be prudent to have someone to watch him. Another job for Marchesa Elisa, perhaps. Charlotte had to admit she had redeemed herself with taking care of the Russian agent.

A Russian agent! Sniffing around Lobkowicz Palace and Nelahozeves, searching vehicles going in and out, dressing up in disguises, tapping phone lines, just like the old days. What the hell did the Russians think they were doing, planting someone like that practically under her nose. It was almost like a taunt. She barely had an appetite for the plate of
risotto alla seppia
the waiter was setting out on the table on the terrace, snapping the white linen napk
in with a pleasing thwack. She allowed herself a poignant smile as he poured her a glass of Prosecco.

•   •   •

“T
he senator from Virginia ate only black food out of respect for the dead,”
La Repubblica
would report the next day. “She carried out her sad task of accompanying the body of the dead American tycoon back to the United States on Air Force 2 with great dignity, in a black Valentino suit with a lovely matching hat.”

EIGHTEEN

“I
t’s an
ars moriendi
,” said Miles, holding up the leather-bound book Sarah had found in the box at Nela. “In the fifteenth century, after the Black Death killed off half the population and most of the priests, the Church let secular writers produce volumes that used woodcuts to get the word out about how to die a good Christian death.” He put the book down and turned back to his computer. Sarah glanced around the office.

Max had not shown up at Powder Tower yesterday as they had arranged. After some hesitation she tried his cell, but it went right to voice mail. So Sarah trudged back through Old Town Square and across Charles Bridge with an increasing feeling of dread and paranoia that was all the more strange for the happy international mélange of tourists photographing one another in front of the statues, and loading up on cheap watercolors of Prague scenes, marionettes, and “Czech It Out!” refrigerator magnets.

Today, Sarah decided to inquire about the book as a pretext for finding out if Miles had seen Max.

“Actually I was wondering if I could borrow it. I’m interested in the drawings,” Sarah lied. “So was Max. Have you seen him, by the way?”

“Not since yesterday morning when you two came back from Nela,” said Miles. He looked narrowly at her and Sarah tried to keep her expression blank.

“I’ll bring it back,” said Sarah. “But I want to learn how to die a good Christian death.”

Miles laughed.

“It’s not actually incunabula,” he said. “It’s an eighteenth-century copy and in horrible condition, not worth much, but treat it carefully anyway.” Sarah promised and left his office, still anxious and unsatisfied.

After spending ten minutes staring at a single sequence of notes from the Sixth Symphony, Sarah gave up. As she went down a hallway, she could hear Eleanor and Daphne chatting about the upcoming masquerade ball, so she ducked out a side door and decided to take a walk. If she stayed in the palace she would be pulled into conversations she’d be unable to focus on, and people would ask her what was wrong. It would be hard not to answer, “Oh, you know . . . murder.”

Outside, she considered walking over to Strahov Monastery to look at the famous library there, but decided she had had enough of ancient books. She turned instead toward the Royal Garden.

As she passed the old Riding School (now a contemporary art museum), she heard one of the ubiquitous tour guides addressing a group of tourists.

“This spot was once Emperor Rudolf II’s private zoo,” squawked the guide. “You will find a double-tailed lion on all the heraldic emblems of this country. Rudolf was particularly fond of lions. There is a story that the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who served as the emperor’s private astrologer, predicted that the emperor’s fate was tied to that of his favorite pet lion, Oskar. And the day after Oskar died, so did the emperor.” The tourists gave a little “oooh.”

She strolled through the gardens, trying to clear her head and simply be a tourist for a few minutes. The gardens, she knew, had been closed to the public during the communist era. But the commies had left their mark. Peering through a line of fir trees at the façade of Ball Game Hall, she ran her eyes over the robed allegories of Astronomy, Agriculture, Virtue, Industry, and the Elements. Carved next to Industry’s head was a hammer and sickle. What would this generation add to it? A “For Sale” sign, probably.

It felt good to be moving, so Sarah kept walking, trying to focus on her surroundings and not on Max’s mysterious disappearance, or Andy, or Sherbatsky. She crossed Cech Bridge, wandering into Josefov, the old Jewish section of Prague. She waved to the statue of Rabbi Loew.

“Rabbi Loew created the golem, a man out of dirt from the riverbank below,” a tour guide was announcing to a group of rapt Japanese schoolgirls.

“According to
legend
,” Sarah muttered. She hated this mixing of fact and fiction, especially in talking to children. Why confuse them about what was real and what was not?

Sarah passed the high-end glass shops on Paris Street. This is what tourists do, she told herself. They stroll. They gaze. She scanned the goblets, vases, plates, and tumblers on display. They were beautiful, and she should go in and buy something for her mother. Except her mother would be too worried about how much it might have cost to ever enjoy this kind of thing.

Sarah kept going and arrived in Old Town Square just in time to catch the rays of the setting sun reflected off the golden twin spires of the Church of Our Lady Before Týn. A puppet troupe was setting up, and a portly bearded man in Elizabethan dress was explaining to a gathering group of tourists the plot of Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
, while the black-clad puppeteers got their papier-mâché creations ready to begin the show.

“The action takes place in Venice,” announced the man in tights. “For English audiences, Venice was synonymous with all things decadent and sinful. Corrupting wealth, greed, thievery, prostitution, disease, incest, murder . . .”

The ominous feeling was back. Where was Max? Hoping he would appear, she turned away from the puppet theater and wandered across the square to look at the Astronomical Clock, which had been drawing tourists since 1490. Sarah gazed up at a figure on the façade of the gothic stone tower: a skeleton, holding an hourglass in one hand and a bell on a rope in the other. Death at every turn, she thought.

“When the hour strikes you will see a parade of the Apostles in the little windows,” said a familiar bassoon voice behind her. She turned to see Nicolas standing there in all his tiny formality. “But it is not impressive. I wouldn’t wait if I were you.”

“Nicolas. Are you following me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why?” asked Sarah.

“I like to pay a visit to the master.” The little man pointed across the square to the Týn church. “He is buried there. I come to make sure he hasn’t gotten out. That is a joke.”

Sarah frowned, trying to recall what she had read about the Týn church in the beer-soaked guidebook.

“They did exhume his body,” Nicolas said. “The first time in 1901, and then just last year. It does appear that he is really, really dead.”

“Tycho Brahe,” said Sarah, triumphantly. “He’s buried there.”

The little man bowed acknowledgment.

“Why are you following me?” Sarah repeated.

“I’m your protector.”

Sarah stifled a laugh. Yes, she wanted to say, you would take a bullet for me as long as it was aimed for somewhere below four-foot-six. “Why do I need protection? What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

“I don’t know what you know, so I don’t know what you don’t know. Come have an aperitif with me. They make an excellent Bellini at the Four Seasons. Best one outside of Venice.”

Sarah sighed but made no move to follow him. The puppet master’s words about Venice echoed in her mind. Corruption. Theft. Murder. “When you picked me up at the airport, you had just come from Venice,” she said. “Why were you there?”

“To pick up a Sassoferrato that had ended up at the Doge’s Palace. One of Hitler’s little gifts to Mussolini. Or should I say ‘regift,’ since it came from the Lobkowicz’s collection.”

“And that’s what was in the trunk?”

Sar>
He nodded.

“Did Max ask you to leave something in Venice?” She continued prodding.

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

“A birthday bouquet of flowers for Marchesa Elisa. She pronounced them ‘dreadful’ and threw them in the canal. A lover’s spat, I suspect.”

Lovers?

“I thought the marchesa person was his
cousin
?” Sarah frowned.

“Distant cousin, yes.” Nicolas waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

“No, you left something in the safe at the Hotel Gritti Palace,” Sarah said, trying to dismiss this insinuation (and how much it irritated her). “Something that Max wanted hidden. What was it?”

“What, you think I’m one of those court dwarfs from the sixteenth century?” Nicolas’s voice was suddenly hostile. “Privy to all the secrets of the royal family, because they were considered to be nothing more than a talking dog?”

“No one considers you a talking dog.”

“Then come with me.”

Sarah sighed again. This kind of thing was exceptionally annoying. If you were not attracted to someone, they automat
ically assumed it was because you could not see past their physical flaw, oddity, or anomaly, real or imaginary. “It’s my freckles, isn’t it?” sobbed one freshman on her doorstep. “No,” she told him. “It’s your personality.”

But she couldn’t be cruel to Nicolas. He had fashioned himself as her protector, though she felt that his feelings went a little more below the belt. And besides, she had grown out of that sort of casual cruelty. Unrequited lust was not something to exploit.

Or was it? Was Max really involved romantically with Marchesa Elisa? “Lead the way,” Sarah said. “But you’re buying.”