City of Dark Magic (4 page)

Pols did not like her teasing tone. “You can laugh, but it’s true. There’s a castle outside of Prague built over a hell portal. Half-man, half-animal winged creatures fly out of it, and if you go near it you age thirty years in one second.” Pols coughed again. “Prague is a place where the fabric of time is thin.”

Sarah sighed. “Pols, are you okay? And how do you know all this about Prague?” Despite her globe-trotting parents, as far as Sarah knew, the little girl hadn’t been out of Back Bay.

“I just wish I could go with you,” Pols said sadly, leaning against Sarah’s shoulder. “The Lobkowiczes are a great Catholic family. And Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz was my favorite of Beethoven’s patrons. He was a singer and a musician, too. And he had a clubfoot, did you know that?”

“Yup. Did you know that Beethoven once freaked out over something he did and stood in the doorway of Lobkowicz Palace shouting, ‘Lobkowicz is a donkey!’ over and over again?”

Pollina giggled.

“Let’s eat some more ice cream,” Sarah said. “And then play me something, okay?”

An hour and a half later, Sarah left an almost sleeping Pollina tucked up on the sofa, covered partly by one of the many embroidered shawls in the room and partly by Boris.

Jose met her in the hallway, wearing a giant peach bathrobe. Sarah was surprised to see him still awake and, it seemed, relatively sober.

“She asleep?” Jose asked, jerking his head in the di Seadoberection of the music room. Sarah nodded, attempting to thread her way between Jose, a Louis XVI commode, and a porcelain cheetah umbrella stand.

“Listen, Jose.” Sarah lowered her voice. “Is she okay? I mean, all that coughing? She seems a little feverish.”

Jose shrugged theatrically.

“Who knows? I tell her to let me call the doctor and she tells me that she is in God’s hands. I say, God’s hands are awesome, but what about a little Theraflu? Lately she no want to sleep at night and she keeps coming to my room and waking me up: Jose, I can’t find Lamby; Jose, I can’t reach the cereal; Jose, this can’t be Otto Klemperer conducting, you messed up my CDs again.”

Jose leaned forward.

“And then when she does sleep, she get the nightmares. I worry, okay? She dream of fire, all the time. And you see, she want that fire all the time, going. It’s hot as hell in here.”

“I’ll be away for a couple of months,” Sarah said. “You e-mail me, all right? Every few days. And get her to see a doctor.”

“Everybody goes away,” Jose said sadly. “But we stay, slowly burning up to death.”

Sarah patted Jose on his fuzzy shoulder and stepped out into the Boston evening. It was already muggy a
nd warm, though slightly less so than the interior of Pollina’s mansion. Sarah was surprised to find she was shivering.

FOUR

S
arah’s T ride home was blissfully free of the usual subway saxophonists and zealots, and gave her a few minutes to organize her thoughts. Tomorrow she should get a few books on Prague, maybe a Czech-English dictionary. A raincoat? She was going to a castle, did she need some kind of evening gown? She had never owned anything remotely like that. The last time Sarah had bought a dress was for her former roommate Andrea’s wedding. It was a hot dress, but the zipper was broken. Her date, George, whom she had taken to the wedding on the theory that you should always take a wildly inappropriate person to functions where nuptials were involved, had gotten it caught in the lining. Served her right, really, having sex in a supply closet of the Boston Hyatt. But George had smelled like oranges and leather and he had bent her over one of those carts housekeeping wheeled around with soaps and shower caps and dry-cleaning request forms. That had been fun, and afterward she had pocketed some shampoo and conditioner. There probably wasn’t time to get the zipper fixed.

Sarah realized she was focusing on inanities in order not to think about Sherbatsky. And leaving poor Pols.

Sarah let herself into the apartment. Alessandro was out, and she decided to take a bath. Stripping down, flinging clothes around her room, she almost tripped over something hard and sharp. Funny. Her father’s toolbox was in the middle of the room. She kept it in the back of her closet. What was it doing out? Sarah glanced up and noticed something else. Her computer laptop was open. She never left it open. And Alessandro, as odd and boundary-free in many ways as he was, would not have touched her computer. Had someone been in her room? She hadn’t turned on many lights when she came home. Had there been a break-in? Was she not alone in the V in apartment?

Sarah looked around for a weapon. Not seeing anything more threatening than her
Oxford Unabridged Dictionary
, she knelt down, opened her father’s tool kit, and grabbed a hammer.

The good thing about the kind of square footage two young academics in Boston can afford is that one can conduct a thorough investigation of it in just under fifteen minutes. Sarah wondered how this previously overlooked feature of her apartment might be condensed for a real estate ad:
Must see! This easy-to-search-for-lurking-psychopath 2 bdrm charmer with orig wd floors will go fast!

As empowering as it was to walk around her apartment like Thor, it was also tiring. Returning to her bedroom, Sarah examined her computer to see if any files had been deleted or anything looked tampered with. She searched through the papers on her desk and then examined the toolbox more closely.

Her mom had given it to her the Christmas before she went off to college, although Dad had already been gone for a decade by then. It had been a weird, startling thing to see on Christmas morning. Intensely familiar yet upsetting. And she had felt an unreasonable rush of disappointment when she opened it up and found only tools. She wondered what she had expected—a last letter from her father telling her how much he loved her? A CD of his voice? Her father himself, emerging cramped but whole from this tiny hiding place? It was all she had of her father’s possessions. Perhaps that was why she had added The Page to its contents, which was her own secret bittersweet talisman. The Page was just an ordinary sheet of ruled paper, covered with Sarah’s fourth-grade writing.

Sally and Cindy walked around the house and counted the windows again. Sally went one way, and Cindy the other. They met up again on the sagging porch by the front door.

“Fifty-two,” said Sally firmly.

“Fifty-two,” said Cindy, just as firmly.

They marched back into the ancient old structure.

“I’ll start at the top,” said Sally. “In the attic. You start in the basement.”

The two girls went from room to room, counting the windows. They were very careful, counting little round windows and big dormers. French doors onto balconies counted as one. The rules were very clear to both of them, for they had been counting for days.

Once again, they met by the front door. “Fifty-one,” said Cindy.

“Fifty-one,” said Sally.

There was a window missing. If they counted fifty-two windows on the outside of the house, then the house had fifty-two windows. But they could only find fifty-one windows when searching the rooms. That meant only one thing.

“There’s a secret room,” said Sally.

C [on ’indy looked at her sister and nodded. “We have to find it.”

The scene did not come from Sarah’s imagination. It was from a book, whose title she did not know, whose author’s name she could not remember. A book that her fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hill, was reading on the day when the school’s guidance counselor had come and interrupted the teacher’s afternoon story session. The counselor whispered to Miss Hill, who turned to Sarah.

“Sarah, would you go with Miss Cummins, please?”

Sarah had been surprised. She could sometimes be naughty, but her father had promised her that if she continued to excel in school and music, he would buy her a violin in the spring, and so she had been especially good all winter. This promise was, of course, a secret from her mother, who would have pointed out that their car had four bald tires that needed replacing. Sarah told her dad that the violin she rented through the school was fine, but he said he was proud of her talent and wanted her to have her own. Though a trace of snow still coated the frozen ground, crocuses were beginning to appear, and Sarah lay awake every night, thinking about how smooth and scratch-free a new instrument would be. Sarah wondered if maybe this was some kind of wonderful surprise that Miss Cummins was in on. Maybe she was about to present her with the violin!

Sarah skipped down the hallway alongside Miss Cummins, who closed the office door behind them and motioned to a chair. When Sarah looked up at her, she was suddenly surprised and uncomfortable to see Miss Cummins was crying.

Sarah looked at her, wondering what was the matter with her. She slid off her chair and went over to the counselor, putting a hand on her back. The woman took a breath and looked at Sarah.

“Your father had an accident on the highway,” Miss Cummins said. “I’m so sorry, Sarah. He’s dead. Your daddy is dead.”

Sarah never heard the end of the story about Sally and Cindy and the house with the missing window. And she could never be certain if the accident hadn’t been caused by the bald tires on her father’s car. Tires that might have been replaced if her daddy hadn’t been saving up to buy her a violin. In some strange way, these things had gotten tangled up in her mind, and Sarah spent a lot of time in the year after her father’s death trying to reconstruct the story of Cindy and Sally and the house with the secret room. But this one little scene was all she could remember. She wrote it over and over again, but it didn’t change anything. Her father was gone forever.

She couldn’t even ask her old teacher, Miss Hill, about the book, because after the funeral, her mother had needed time to get their lives together, and she had sent Sarah off to stay with her uncle Fred and aunt Margot. Sarah had lost touch with her classmates. Then she was selected to attend Boston Latin for high school, a long commute from the old neighborhood. By the time Sarah went back to ask about the book, Miss Hill had left the school. And no one knew which book she was talking about.

It wasn’t like Sarah hadn’t spent a lot of time in libraries. But it was hard to find a book when you didn’t know the author or the title, and it wasn’t a well-known favorite. She had asked every children’s librarian she had come across, with no luck.

Sarah didn’t keep a journal, didn’t scrapbook, or make photo albums. But she had hung on to The Page.
[ Panio

•   •   •

R
estless, Sarah prowled the apartment again but found nothing other than a bug on the ceiling of the kitchen. Well, she could at least kill the bug. It might feel good to smash something, let off a little steam. Sarah took off her shoes and, holding on to the hammer, stood on a kitchen chair, then on the table, then on top of her beloved and completely outdated seven-volume
Lives of the Romantic Composers
.

It was only then that she could see that her intended victim was not a bug. It was a symbol, written in a minute hand:

Sarah stared at the strange drawing. Someone
had
been here.

“
Gesu cristo,”
said Alessandro, coming through the apartment door and spotting Sarah perched on the heights of musical scholarship with a hammer in her hands.

“I think someone broke into the apartment,” said Sarah, climbing down. “But I don’t think they took anything.”

Alessandro made a quick check of his belongings, and returned to confirm that nothing was missing, not even his stash of pot.

“Why they no take our TV?” he said, insulted. “Is very nice TV.”

Sarah showed him the strange symbol, but Alessandro had no idea what it meant either.

“I think what we need is a nice grappa,” he suggested. “Tomorrow you sleep on plane.”

After
a grappa, Sarah still had no idea what the symbol meant, who would have put it there, or why. But after two grappas, she didn’t care at all.