City of Dark Magic (20 page)

There was something in it. A piece of paper, the size of a fortune inside a cookie. Sarah opened it and recognized Max’s distinctive handwriting.

2 a.m. Be SAFE.

A warning? A recommendation?

No, Sarah realized. It was an invitation. Max was planning on breaking into Miles’s safe tonight, or rather tomorrow. Two a.m.

Sarah decided the best place to hide an object was somewhere really dumb and ordinary, so she tossed the pillbox into the plastic zip bag where she kept all her bathroom stuff. As she jogged up the stairs, she tore Max’s note into tiny pieces.
I should switch to coffee,
she thought, entering the kitchen. It was going to be a long night.

TWENTY-SEVEN

S
he had dragged dinner out as long as possible, downing espressos while encouraging everyone else to drink up the Roudnice red, so that they’d all be sound asleep when she and Max began prowling. But she was the one who felt sleepy. It had been a long day, a long week, a long summer. She was exhausted, and the walls of the windowless room hummed gently in a very lulling way. She closed her eyes for just a second, then startled—had she fallen asleep? What time was it? She looked at her phone: 12:27. Better set the alarm, just in case.

Sarah tried to think. She thought about Sherbatsky and wondered what the professor had seen when he took the drug. The drug. Where did it come from? It was dangerous. It was wonderful. Max. Max thought someone was trying to frame him, and her recent interaction with Miles offered some proof of that.

Max. The drug. What was in that drug? She had traveled back in time . . . no. She stopped herself. Max had given her a scientific explanation for what she had seen—something about glial cells. Traces of energy, like the lingering impression of a lightbulb on your retina after you close your eyes.

Sarah opened her eyes. Alessandro had talked to her about glial cells. And the dark matter of the universe. She hadn’t spoken to Sandro all summer, just a few e-mail exchanges to make sure he had paid the electric bill and that no one else had broken into the apartment.

Alessandro might be able to tell her more about glial cells. It was early evening in Boston. Sarah climbed out of the sub-basement, and made her way up to the roof of the palace, the best place for cell reception. People took cigarette breaks up here, and the view was spectacular. Sarah took deep breaths of the foggy night air, admiring the scattered lights spread out across Prague. The dark spires of the innumerable churches cut into the night sky like teeth. She walked along the roof, examining the different views of the city, feeling the night air, trying to get amped up for some safecracking.

It was strange how much the real city looked exactly like the insanely precise cardboard model begun as a hobby in 1826 by Antonin Lagweil that was now housed in the Prague City Museum. Sarah had hoofed it over to the exhibition in order to get a good look at the city as Beethoven had seen it. Not all that much had changed since 1826. Less horse manure to wade through now, no doubt, but probably the same number of crazy-eyed marionette vendors. Down on the banks of the river she could just pick out the Rudolfinum, where Pols would play tomorrow. She could see the walls of the old Jewish quarter, and closer below her, the big Malostranská metro station with its crazy quilt of tram tracks around it. There was a bar there where one night she had been drafted into a multilingual Ping-Pong tournament that had almost devolved into violence.

She walked to the other side of the building and looked down into the courtyards of the castle complex, which also looked sort of fake, like the cheap 3-D paper models they sold in the St. Vitus gift shop. No one about except a lone figure crossing the courtyard carrying something large. Laundry, she thought. A big bag of laundry.

Her view was suddenly obscured by a thicker bank of fog, and she shivered, and dialed Alessandro’s number.

As her phone rang through, she heard a warning beep. Shit, it was almost out of battery. Why hadn’t she checked that? Now she would have to quickly say, “Hi, how’s your summer? Can stimulated glial cells make you see traces of energy from the past? Oh, oops, I have to go.”

Damn it.

“Ciao, bella! We were just talking about you!” Sarah could hear music playing in the background. It sounded like Bailey’s recorder.

Beep,
said Sarah’s phone.

“Bailey come over to drop off mail from your office,” Alessandro said. “I make him cocktake him cil. He play me ‘Merry Wenches A-Washing Their Wimples.’ Very funny madrigal.”

“Ha. Listen, do you have anything you can e-mail me about glial cells?”

“What?” Alessandro laughed. “What you say. Eels? Bailey, Sarah wants to know about eels!”

Beep.

“Sarah,” said Bailey, who had evidently grabbed the phone. “How’s Prague?”

“It’s great. Loving it. Can you put Sandro back on?”

Beep.

“You have a letter here from Professor Sherbatsky,” Bailey said, with a slightly more somber tone. “I guess he must have sent it before he . . . you know.”

The hair on Sarah’s arms stood up. Sherbatsky had written to her! Maybe it was about the location of the missing letter between Luigi and Prince Lobkowicz. Maybe it had to do with the drug, or Max.

“My phone’s about to die,” Sarah shouted. “Bailey, open the letter, okay? Read it to me. Right now, be quick.”

“Okay, hold on.”

Sarah looked at her watch: 1:15.

“Okay,” Bailey said. “Here it is. Oh. It’s just a doodle.”

“A doodle?” Sarah shrieked, feeling a little hysterical.

“It’s like a circle, with a dot in the center, and then a line with . . . oh, Alessandro is saying it’s like something that’s on your ceiling. Huh. Listen, you still want me to send it or should—”

The phone went dead.

The symbol that had been drawn on the ceiling. What was that about? As last messages go, it was a totally sucky one.

Sarah bent down and tried to trace what she remembered of the symbol in the gravel of the roof. After a few minutes, she thought she had it.

Sarah couldn’t be certain, but she thought that was the symbol she had glimpsed on Max’s cigarette case. Or was it the symbol on the cigarette case that she was remembering? The brain did funny things.

Sarah stepped around the skylights and over to the door to the stairs. She turned the handle and pulled, but it wouldn’t open. She pulled again, as hard as she could. It didn’t budge. She realized in horror that she hadn’t blocked it open when she had come out here, and it had locked behind her. But hadn’t she blocked it? There was a little cast-iron dog that all the researchers used to hold the door open. It was one of those automatic gestures, like tossing your keys on the hall table, so she couldn’t be sure she had done it. But it would be odd if she hadn’t. Well, the point was, she was stuck on the roof. Crap. It was getting colder by the second, not to mention that she was supposed to be cracking Miles’s safe with Max in forty-five minutes. Forty-two minutes, now.

Sarah walked around the roof, looking for another way down. There’s always Sherbatsky’s way, she thought with a shiver, unwilling to look over the edge. She peered down through the skylights into the third-floor workrd-floorrooms, but saw only the faint glow of security lights, no one moving below. She walked back over to the edge of the roof, and noticed with relief that the figure she had seen earlier was crossing back across the courtyard, now minus the laundry. If she got his attention, she could get him to come up and let her down.

She whistled, but the figure was running, no doubt anxious to get home after a long day’s work, and didn’t stop.

The fog was making her thin black T-shirt wet, and she began to shiver for real. She leaned over the south wall of the roof and considered the scaffolding. Too far to jump. She could see little red dots among the beams that she hadn’t noticed before. Cameras, she thought with a start. Was there a camera in Miles’s office? Would Max know that? Had Andy installed them? She was not having trouble staying awake now.

She heard a nearby sound, almost underneath her feet, and ran to the skylight, peering down. Someone moving slowly, with a mop. She knocked on the skylight. The person stopped, looked around, not sure where the knocking was coming from. The woman—Sarah could see now that it was a woman—started mopping again. Sarah knocked again. The woman looked up. Sarah waved, not sure if the woman could see her or not. But the woman waved back, and shuffled off. Sarah heaved a sigh of relief.

A few moments later, the door opened.

“Thank you!” Sarah almost shouted. Her savior was a woman in her sixties in a long ragged cardigan, hair pulled back into a sleek bun. Her shuffling gait made her look older. Sarah followed her slowly down the stairs to the third floor. She stopped and looked back. There was no cast-iron dog doorstopper. Who had moved it?

“I am slow,” said the woman, going one stair at a time. “Excuse me.”

“No problem. I went out to make a phone call, and the door locked behind me,” Sarah explained, following the woman down the stairs. “Thank God you came along.”

“I am happy I can help you,” said the woman. “I am usually alone here at night. Just me and ghosts.”

Sarah smiled, thinking,
You have no idea
.

“Your English is very good,” said Sarah. As Janek had explained at dinner, usually anyone over thirty had not studied English, since under the communists it was strictly verboten, or whatever the Czech word was for verboten.

“Yes,” sighed the woman. “I was to go to America.”

Sarah hesitated. She should really go and find Max and warn him that there was someone else awake in the building. But the woman seemed so lonely, and she had saved her. Sarah checked her watch: 1:37.

“Did you ever go?” asked Sarah. “To America?”

The woman shook her head. She shuffled back to her mop and bucket. Her gait looked so painful. She must have terrible arthritis, thought Sarah.

“I was dancer,” she said. “Principal ballerina in the Prague National Theater Ballet.”

“Wow,” said Sarah. There was something regal and dancerlike to her posture, now that she mentioned it, despite the arthritis. “That must have been exciting.” Sarah didn’t really know much about ballet.

“Yes. But no, how you Americans say it, artistic freedom. We were going on tour, to New York, 1978. I had never in my life thought of defecting. But that year, I think of it. There was boy, here in Prague. Jack, an American visiting his mother’s family. We were both sixteen year old. My first love.”

Sarah realized with a shock that the woman was not in her sixties. She was barely fifty.

“He tell me all about America. Teach me English. One day he say he find American woman in Prague who can help me. She can arrange things. I am nervous. I never see this woman, she work for your government, but in secret intelligence, I am thinking. Your CIA. I talk to her on phone. ‘I will help you,’ she say. ‘Thank you,’ I cry. I tell her I will never forget her. Every day, every breath, I will think of her. I suppose meet her on certain night. She will have papers and a car for us. We will get to Berlin. I tell no one. Not even family. That night after performance I am coming out of Lenin metro station. Now is called Dejvická. A black car come out of nowhere. Hit me. I fall to ground, screaming. The car stop. A man come over. He look at me. He see that I am mostly okay. ‘Help me up,’ I say. ‘Please, I am okay.’ I think I can still go to meet Jack. Then man grab my arms. Hold me. The car back up. He hold me while the car back over my feet. Both ankle. All bones crushed to dust. He get in car and drive away.” Sarah stared at her, but the woman did not say anything more. She picked up her mop and swabbed the parquet.

“Did you ever see the boy again?” Sarah asked. “Did he know why you didn’t show up?” Did the guy spend the last thirty-plus years thinking that a fickle ballerina had changed her mind and broken his heart, or was he the one who had ratted on her?

The woman shook her head. “I am out of ballet. Not allowed even to teach. My parents lose jobs. My aunts and uncles lose jobs. No one want to talk to m
e. I think I will die of starvation. But Yuri Bespalov, head of National Museum, take pity on me. He give me job here. I am lucky I work here many, many years, while it is state museum. Every night I make sure it is clean for next day’s visitors. I scrape all the gum. I clean toilet. But I am worried now. Museum is private. Run by Americans. I am old woman, ‘insurance liability’ they say. I am afraid I will lose job. I have nothing. Please ask them to let me keep job.”