City of Dark Magic (25 page)

The first part is meant to portray the world as we know it, full of struggle and hardship. The second movement is filled with unbelievably beautiful transcendence, an escape to an almost supernatural place of peace, reconciliation, love. Sarah was hearing the music with new ears, feeling its mysticism and power.

If Pols had played with verve before, now she was a whirling dervish, her hands barely visible on the keys. The tension was almost unbearable; her thin arms hardly seemed capable of the ferocity with which she was playing. And then the second movement began. Sarah’s heart swelled. It was right, it was right. This was how it was supposed to be. Perhaps this was what Pols meant when she talked about God.

As she played the final chord, Pols slumped across the keyboard, apparently unconscious.

THIRTY-THREE

T
he doctor wanted to take Pols to the hospital for observation, and Sarah was more than happy to accommodate this, but Pols had insisted that she just needed to sleep. Sarah, not wanting to upset the girl further, agreed to take her back to the hotel if Pollina promised to see a doctor back in Boston.

“I didn’t win,” said Pols, sadly.

“I think you won,” said Sarah.

Sarah left Pols resting at the hotel with a large bowl of chicken soup with dumplings. Jose was on guard with orders to open for no one. Apparently he had packed a bowie knife in his checked luggage. Sarah looked at the serrated edge and hoped for the best. Boris placed himself across the doorway to the little girl’s bedroom.

“Show me your teeth,” Sarah said.

Boris bared his fangs and gave her an understanding look.

•   •   •

W
hen Sarah returned to her room at the palace, she found Max waiting for her in the hallway.

“Let’s go to my office,” he said, in a low voice. Sarah followed him.

Moritz, the Czech wolfhound, raised his head from a large and extremely ratty-looking dog bed in the corner. A stuffed lion, with the heraldic two tails one saw about Prague, was nestled between his enormous paws. Sarah went over to pet him. Moritz sniffed Boris on her hands, seemed to find the scent simpatico, and went back to gnawing his lion.

Sarah sat down in one of Max’s leather chairs, warily.

“Eleanor was shot in the head,” Max reported. “The gun was in the netting at the base of the well. Her fingerprints were on the trigger.”

“You don’t believe she killed herself,” Sarah said. “You heard what Miles said. Eleanor found those letters that Miles and Janek were looking at.”

“I have a theory,” Max said. “Listen. What if the woman in those letters was Eleanor herself? She’s the right age. She could’ve been in Prague in the 1970s. She could’ve been working here undercover as an art historian. She
was
an art historian. She had an affair with a KGB agent and he gave her things from the palace in exchange for information. She came back here to look for the lost letters. She was at Nela. She could’ve killed Andy. Maybe he was working undercover for the CIA, looking for the letters, too.”

“But then why would she have turned them over to Miles?” Sarah said. She wanted to tell him about Charlotte Yates, but she hesitated.

“People do strange things,” Max sighed. “Maybe she couldn’t stand the guilt anymore. Maybe she was giving herself up.”

For a minute Sarah wanted to believe this theory. It was certainly easier than believing that an American senator was taking hits out on people at the palace. Her mind raced back over the details of the day at Nela. Had Eleanor recognized Andy Blackman in his disguise as a Czech policeman? They had been working all afternoon in the library together, but she hadn’t actually seen Eleanor during the afternoon, and they had only communicated intermittently. There were so many strange details. Sarah watched Max’s dog lift his toy up in his jaws and make neck-breaking movements.

“Whose Chihuahua was that?” she asked, suddenly.

“What Chihuahua?”

“The one at Nela when Eleanor and I met you there. It bit her.”

“Oh,” said Max. “He belongs to Elisa.”

Sarah’s eyebrows went up. “Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti?”

Max nodded.

“She was at Nela the day you and I met there?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “Well, she had just left, actually.”

Sarah chose her words carefully, while trying to sound ten percent as emotional as she felt.

“So on the day that Andy was killed, Marchesa Elisa was atÀ Elisa w Nela and could have been responsible for any or all of that and you never felt the need to tell me about her?”

“It didn’t seem that significant at the time,” said Max, sounding defensive. “My cousin’s not capable of killing anyone . . . unless they stole her front-row seat at a fashion show.”

“So you know her very well.”
Do you know that she’s in Prague right now?

Max walked over to his office wall, where a large family tree hung. Sarah wondered what it must feel like to see your entire lineage back to the 1400s all charted out. Max pointed to the lower area of the tree.

“Her grandfather and my grandfather were brothers. Hers was the black sheep of the family. When my grandfather went to England during World War II, her grandfather went to Italy and married an Italian countess.”

“And she’s a Beethoven expert?”

“Expert’s a stretch. She’s very good at insinuating herself into any high-level gathering. She collects powerful friends. She has a historic palazzo right on the Grand Canal, and she invites people there constantly—movie stars, politicians, fashion designers. Her profession is to be fabulous.” He said it with scorn, but in a way that Sarah did not find convincing.

Sarah digested all of it. It almost made sense in a very terrifying way.

But no.

Her mind clicked over names, dates, places, details. Old blood. Secrets. Power. Money. And more power. She was not crazy. For the first time since arriving in Prague, Sarah felt maybe she was ahead of the story instead of behind it.

The marchesa, with her connections in Washington and her fondness for collecting powerful friends, was almost certainly the senator’s eyes and ears—if not gun- and knife-wielding hands—in the palace. She had a bone to pick with the family itself, her grandfather having been cut out of his inheritance in favor of Max’s grandfather. To the marchesa, it must be painfully clear that all this could have been hers. And much of it still could be, if she played her cards right.

Max did not seem to notice that his cousin had motive, means, and proximity to all the strange goings-on. Sarah couldn’t just do the full Oprah and sit side by side with Max on the couch, starting with, “Honey, I think your cousin is trying to kill us all.” She would have to think this through so as to convince him she hadn’t lost her mind. She would have to prove it to him. And she needed proof about Charlotte Yates’s connection to Yuri Bespalov. Just being in the CIA was not enough. The senator might have the letters, but there might be some other way to prove her involvement. Some trace . . .

“I want to take the drug again,” said Sarah.

“There isn’t any more,” said Max, returning to his desk.

“What do you mean?”

He opened an ornate music box on his desk, slid back a false bottom, and show
ed her the secret compartment.

“I’ve been keeping it here, but someone’s emptied it. Nico, maybe, but he won’t say.”

“That was it?” she said. “Can’t we get more?”

“I don’t know,” Max said. “I really don’t.”

Sarah sunk onto a chair, realizing all the things she would do if she could have one more tiny sliver of the drug that allowed you to see the dead, to watch them going about their lives. She could have moved through time just enough to see Eleanor’s murderer, or Yuri Bespalov’s lover. She could have seen Beethoven.

Her father . . . if she took the drug to Boston, she could have seen her father again.

Max sat down next to her on the sofa. It made her uncomfortable, to have him so close. It fucked with her judgment.

“I found the hidden room,” Max said. “It’s a library. Want to see it?”

THIRTY-FOUR

“I
t was pretty easy,” Max said, modestly, fanning a sheaf of architectural drawings out across his desk. “You remember the missing window I found? Well, I just searched around until I found earlier renderings of the palace and compared them with current ones. Here it is.”

Sarah stood up and joined Max behind his desk. His finger traced rectangular lines and pointed to a tiny line of script in the middle of the rectangle. Max handed Sarah a magnifying glass and she leaned in.

Library

“What’s a library doing in the basement?” Sarah asked.

“Especially when there was already a library aboveground,” Max agreed.

“So, how do you get to it?” Sarah asked.

Max covered the older drawing with the current architectural layout.

“You see,” he explained, “the ‘library’ was sectioned off later into two rooms. This other one was used for storage. And maybe to help conceal the library. Like a kind of decoy. It’s the only other room in the palace without a window.”

Sarah looked at Max.

“My room doesn’t have a window,” she said.

“Bingo. Your room is the threshold into the library.” Max grinned.

“Great,” Sarah sighed. “So we bulldoze my room tonight? Or do the Lobkowiczes keep a couple of battering rams lying about?”

Max pulled out another sheaf of drawings and splayed them across the desk.

“Much simpler,” he explained. “There’s a tunnel below these rooms. Below that whole wing of the palace. I know this because we had to do a major pest control survey and it was recommended that these tunnels get sealed off.” Max blinked up at her. “Rats,” he said. “Rats like you would not believe. Rats the size of dogs.”

“If you think I am burrowing into a rat-infested tunnel,” Sarah said firmly, “you have truly lost your mind.”

“The rats are gone,” Max said hƀastily. “I think. Or I hope they’re gone, anyway. We couldn’t use poison. It was actually pretty disgusting. But anyway there are two unsealed exits to the tunnels. You will have to crawl. Or, if you are Nicolas, stoop.”

“You sent Nico into the tunnel?” Sarah couldn’t help laughing. “Well, I guess he does have training from the summer with the Siberian acrobats. If the man can wiggle into my T-shirt while tied to my bed, he can manage a simple tunnel.”

“That was my thought exactly,” said Max, grinning. “Apparently there are a couple of breaks in the ceiling of the tunnel, with ladders leading upward. Trapdoors in the floors of the rooms above. You remember that your room was once part of the dungeon?”

Sarah shivered. She wasn’t likely to forget. A wave of nausea passed through her. The smell of vomit, of shit, of fear. The screaming.

“Nico made a map of where the ladders are.”

Max took a piece of transparent paper and smoothed it over the architectural rendering.

“Right here. Right under where the library is, or was, is a trapdoor,” Max said, triumphantly.

“Which Nico went into?” Sarah asked, taking a deep breath and replacing the horrid smell of the dungeons with the smell of Max’s skin. Sarah resisted the impulse to bury her face in his neck.

“It’s locked,” Max said.

“Of course it’s locked,” Sarah snorted impatiently. “It can’t be that easy. Everything here is locked, or chained, or walled-up, or impaled or stabbed or pushed out of a window.” For a moment she felt like crying. Poor Eleanor. Poor Sherbatsky. No. She didn’t need to cry over Eleanor. Or her beloved professor. Or Stefania, the shuffling prematurely aged dancer who had rescued her from the roof. Or the various pawns who had been used and discarded by agents of greed and power through the years. Tears wouldn’t help them. Sarah searched around for a word that would restore her to herself. Justice? Not quite powerful enough. Vengeance? Yeah, that was pretty good. But Sarah knew that deep down the thing that was driving her had nothing to do with exposing Charlotte Yates, or solving the murders, suicides, or disappearances of a rising number or people. No, it was the sense that at the end of all these dark turnings and twists there was an answer waiting for her about something else entirely. Something that Pols would understand. And maybe, if she trusted him, Max, too.

Beethoven.

“Don’t look so sad,” Max said, breaking into her thoughts. “Nico said the lock is old and he thinks it wouldn’t take much to break it at this point. There might be something above the trapdoor, though. A piece of furniture, a bookcase. It’s definitely going to be a two-person job.”

“Nico’s probably breaking in as we speak,” Sarah said. Max shook his head.

“He’s on assignment.”

“Assignment?” Sarah raised an eyebrow.

“I have him keeping watch on the hotel where your little friend is staying,” Max said simply. “He’ll stay with her until she’s safely on a flight out of Prague. Too many bad things have been happening lately. Nico understands what’s at stake. He won’t let anything happen to her.”

This touched Sarah so deeply that she felt like it was time to come clean.

“There might be . . .” Sarah hesitated. “There might be more at stake than you realize.”

Max looked at her gravely, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms, looking so much like the photograph of his grandfather Max above him that it was as if the picture had slipped out of its frame. They wore the exact same inscrutable expression.

Men with secrets,
Sarah thought.

“So tonight?” she said, hedging. “Tonight we break into a secret library?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Max corrected. “Nine a.m., when the construction crew gets started and there’ll be a lot of noise.”

“And in the meantime?”

Max waved a book at her. “I’ve got some reading to do. This one’s about your favorite Lobkowicz: the 7th.”

“When I . . . when I was on the drug. I saw him,” Sarah said. “I saw his face. I heard him speak.”

“I’ve seen him, too,” Max said, quietly, shutting the book. “I went hunting with him, actually.”

“I think you need to tell me about the drug,” Sarah said. She looked across the room to where Max was standing. It was too dark to see his face, but she could sense him frowning, thinking.

“When my grandfather left Prague in 1948, he had nothing but the clothes on his back,” Max said. “That’s the official story, and it’s true, as far as I know, but he wasn’t absolutely destitute. Grandfather Max was a patriot, but he wasn’t a fool. There were some investments, friends, connections. Still, can you imagine? Having to leave behind a family fortune and collection that was begun in 1592. Abandon everything, totally, with no hope of ever getting it back?”

“I can’t imagine it,” Sarah said, honestly.

“Yeah, well, I think I’m only just beginning to,” Max sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe he felt sort of relieved, in a way. It’s a lot of responsibility. I can’t even throw away an old moth-eaten pillow because maybe it once propped up the 6th Princess Lobkowicz’s head or some damned thing. Maybe it was woven by a master of the lost needlepoint style that some academic will jizz over and I need to build a special temperature sensitive display case for it.”

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” said Sarah. Max laughed softly.

“Anyway, Grandfather Max left Prague with two things. His hat and a cigarette case in his pocket.”

“Is that the same cigarette case you have?” Sarah asked. “With the weird symbol on it?”

“When my dad died the lawyers gave it to me,” Max said quietly. “Said my father was supposed to give it to me when I turned twenty-one. My mother’s instructions. But he hadn’t. He basically considered me to be a huge fuck-up. The end of the Lobkowicz line. A total disappointment to my mother’s memory. And look what’s been happening around here. I’m probably the laughingstock of Prague.”

Sarah cˀ Pro">Saouldn’t help it. It wasn’t her style, but she reached out and found Max’s hand. He laced his fingers into hers.

“Anyway, now I have the cigarette case. Grandpa Max’s prized possession. He didn’t smoke,” Max continued. “Apparently he just carried the empty case around. Only it wasn’t empty. There was an envelope inside.”

Sarah found herself holding her breath, waiting.

“Toenail clippings.” Max laughed. “Fucking toenail clippings. I almost threw them out. But I don’t know. Something made me . . . anyway, that’s where the whole thing started.”

“Where what started?” Sarah asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Sherbatsky,” Max said. “He wrote to me and asked if he could come and look at the musical collection. Of course, his credentials were impeccable. He was clearly the best man for the job. He’d been here for a few weeks and then one day he came into my office and showed me a letter he’d found. From Ludwig van Beethoven to Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz. There’s the usual money talk and complaints. And then a reference to his toenails.”

“His toenails?”

“The infernal tricks of my body have subsided, for the moment. But strangely I find that the nails of fingers and toes grow apace. Can this be an effect of the elixir that we shall not name? I confess it frightens me. I send you some examples, which my servant with her usual clumsiness has severed from my person,”
Max quoted.

“Are you serious?” Sarah sat up.

“Well, that was the gist of it anyway,” Max answered. “And I laughed and said, ‘Oh, maybe that’s what the toenails were. Grandfather Max left Prague with his hat and Ludwig van Beethoven’s toenails.’”

“But . . .” Sarah sputtered. “Wouldn’t they . . . be, like, totally decomposed by now? Or biodegraded or whatever?”

“Yup,” Max said. “Toenails are keratin. I looked it up. They shouldn’t . . . I mean it’s strictly impossible. Unless whatever elixir Beethoven was taking had something in it that altered their molecular structure.”

“So you’re telling me the pill I swallowed shaped like a toenail . . . ?”

“Was actually one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s toenails?” Max said. “Um. Yeah.”

Sarah, for the first time in her life, felt herself utterly and completely at a loss for words.

“It was Sherbatsky’s idea,” Max went on, hurriedly. “After I told him about the cigarette case, and the whole story, he went kind of ape-shit. Said he had been tracing all these mysterious references between LVB and the 7th prince to some kind of drug. Something the prince had given him and that Sherbatsky thought had affected Beethoven’s hearing.”

Sarah thought back to the strange vision she had experienced. What was it that Prince Lobkowicz had asked Beethoven?

“Is it working?”
the prince had asked.
“Can you hear me?”

“But the drug makes us move through time,ˀthrough ” Sarah argued. “And Beethoven wasn’t moving through time. I saw him take the drug, or some kind of drug. I got the impression that it made him hear.”

“Heightened perception.” Max nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. But we weren’t taking the pure drug. We were taking, you know, toenails of someone who took the drug a couple hundred years ago. It was polluted. And we’re not moving through time, you know. We’re just seeing things. It’s hard to know if it’s all real.”

There had been something else. Something the 7th prince had said to Beethoven after Beethoven took the pill. What was it?

“
A toast to Brahe
.” Yes, that was it.

Tycho Brahe. The astronomer who had served at the court of Rudolf II. Tycho Brahe, who was, among other things, an alchemist.

“I thought it was totally ridiculous.” Max was still talking. “But we did a bunch of research. First we found out the symbol on the case was some kind of alchemical thing, and Sherbatsky convinced me that there really might have been something going on. I suggested we send the toenails off to a lab, to be tested. I gave the job to Nico. Who evidently decided to keep one and pass it on to you. God knows why.”

“So what did the lab results come back with?” Sarah realized that although Max was speaking calmly, he was gripping her hand very hard. Or was it hers that was clutching his?

“It was . . . strange,” Max said. “Traces of keratin, like you might expect, but a whole bunch of other things. Silver. Myrrh. Elk bone, if you can believe it. And things they couldn’t really identify. ‘Might be this, might be that.’ ‘Very similar to.’ ‘The presence of this is quite surprising.’ That kind of thing. Believe me, the last thing I thought of was to actually ingest a toenail. That was all Sherbatsky. He had talked to some neuroscientist who pointed out that certain chemicals can’t be flushed from the body: They just settle into the cells. Sherbatsky had all these theories about glial cells, too, and perception. And when he told me what had happened when he took one of the things . . . the visions that he had . . . well, I decided to try it for myself.”