City of Dark Magic (7 page)

Miles brightened again. “I don’t expect it will be a problem. Like I said, most of the music collection is complete, it just needs to be organized for display in a coherent fashion. Okay, so I’ll give you the tour and show you your workspace.”

He led Sarah up the stairs to the second floor.

“These were the public rooms, so they’re pretty spacious,” explained Miles. “They haven’t been renovated yet, so forgive the water stains and don’t expect working AC. Each room is dedicated to a different area of the collection. That way we try to stay out of each others’ way.” Something in his tone suggested that that was more of a goal than a reality.

The first room at the top of the stairs had a series of large canvases leaning against the walls, and long worktables set up with portable lights, brushes, and solvents. Some of the paintings were torn, and others had water and mold stains. Standing over one of these was a tall, very thin woman with magenta hair, wearing a pale blue lab coat.

“Sarah Weston, music, meet Daphne Kooster, family portraits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” said Miles. Daphne looked Sarah up and down and gave a provisional smile. “Did ve meet at Harvard?” asked Daphne in a thick Dutch accent, shaking Sarah’s hand firmly.

“Daphne’s from Amsterdam but did her masters at Harvard,” explained Miles.

“I’m at Thoreau,” said Sarah.

“Oh,” said Daphne. “I thought ve vere all connected vith Harvard or Yale in one vay or another. Thoreau?” She stru {?Minion ggled to pronounce the name.

“It’s a couple stops from Harvard on the T,” Sarah said, holding her ground.

“Sarah was a student of Professor Sherbatsky,” Miles said.

“Ohhhhh,” said Daphne. “I am sorry. I didn’t really know him.”

“Polyxena’s coming along beautifully,” said Miles, admiring Daphne’s work. Sarah, interested, looked now at the portrait. Polyxena Lobkowicz was a pale and intelligent-looking woman standing next to a badly painted green velvet chair in which a small white dog lay curled.

“You see de white gown she wears, richly embroidered, showing de family’s wealth and influence,” said Daphne authoritatively. “De red rose in her hair symbolizes her Spanish ancestry. De prayer book in her left hand to display de Catholic allegiance.”

“What does the dog symbolize?” Sarah asked. Daphne blinked at her for a moment.

“De dog is just a dog,” she said, finally.

“You’ve done an exquisite job with this,” Miles said, crisply.

“You think so? I am gratified to hear you say it,” Daphne replied with great formality. They did not look at each other.

Okay, Sarah thought. Clearly Miles and Daphne were sleeping together.

Sarah turned to another painting, a smaller one featuring a somewhat mischievous-looking man with a funky plumed hat.

“Rudolf II,” Miles said. “The Holy Roman Emperor who moved the Imperial Court from Vienna to Prague and ennobled the 1st Prince Lobkowicz.”

“I hope you play soccer,” said Daphne. “I’m trying to organize a regular game for de staff, but mostly they are a bunch of bookvorms.”

•   •   •

S
arah did not get a really good look at the Ceramics Room or the smaller intermediate room filled with packing crates and large signs saying “Do Not Touch” in about eight languages.

“This will be Weapons when the collection arrives tomorrow from Roudnice,” said Miles as they entered a room with astonishingly ugly flowered wallpaper. The parquet floor was slightly buckled with water damage. Miles kept walking.

“And this is the Balcony Room.”

“Because there’s no balcony?” Sarah asked, looking around.

“There was,” said Miles. “Before a nineteenth-century renovation.”

Sarah went to the window and tried to look out, but the glass was covered with plaster dust that had been speckled by rain, making it difficult to see through. She threw the window open and leaned out, taking in the panorama of the city. For a moment, the power tools stopped and there were birds singing, and a light breeze whiffled the leaves of the trees beneath them.

Miles appeared next to her.

“Quiz me,” she said {,"-1" face, pointing to landmarks she recognized from the guidebook she’d read on the plane. “Vltava River, Charles Bridge, Malá Strana . . . and where’s—” Sarah suddenly had the sensation she was leaning too far out. Her stomach fluttered and her heart raced. Vertigo? She had spent her whole life climbing trees, skateboarding off handrails, sitting on the roof to watch fireworks with her dad. The blood began to drain from her head as if she were going to faint . . .

“Careful,” said Miles, grabbing her arm and pulling her back, closing the window. Heart pounding, Sarah looked through the dirty window four stories down to where a cement staircase made its zigzagging way down the steep hillside i
n front of the palace.

“This is the window that Professor Sherbatsky fell from?” Sarah framed it as a question, but it wasn’t really. Somehow she knew it was the place.

Miles nodded.

NINE

“E
leanor told me it was Prince Max who found him?” Sarah asked, forcing herself to deal with the wave of nausea passing over her and to think logically. It just didn’t seem a likely place to commit suicide. The height wasn’t particularly great, and if you were going to throw yourself out a window in a torrent of despair, would you really choose an inconvenient and awkward exit onto a flight of concrete steps? Granted your last view would be pretty, but they were in the Prague Castle complex. There were at least a dozen really fabulous places to off yourself within easy walking distance.

“Well, yes,” Miles said, frowning. “Yes, it was Max. And Nicolas Pertusato, whom you’ve met.”

“How did the police conclude it was suicide?” Sarah asked, a little more sharply than she intended. “I’m sorry, but it just seems so unlikely.”

“Max has had video cameras installed outside the building,” Miles said, pointing out the window. “He doesn’t trust the construction workers. Or anyone, really. Sadly, one of the cameras had footage of . . . apparently it was very deliberate.”

Sarah shook her head in disbelief.

“And Douglas Sexton—he’s working on the collection of Carl Robert Croll paintings—had a conversation with Absalom earlier that evening,” Miles explained. “Douglas had gone to Sherbatsky’s room to borrow some antihistamines and Sherbatsky had given him the whole bottle saying that he no longer needed them. He told Douglas,
The way across has been revealed to me, and I intend to cross over tonight
.”

“That doesn’t even sound like him.” Sarah frowned. “Sherbatsky was fusing traditional musicology with brain science. He definitely did not talk like Professor Dumbledore.”

Miles smiled sadly.

“I met Sherbatsky about ten years ago,” he said softly. “In Vienna. I liked the man, enormously. I can’t help feeling responsible.”

Sarah glanced quickly at Miles, who seemed unable to tear his eyes away from the window.

“I asked him to come,” Miles sighed. “I admit I ~,"- away fknew that with his name behind it we could draw a lot of attention to the Beethoven collection, but I also wanted his company. I should have known something was wrong. He was very preoccupied. And there were complaints. I put it down to Sherbatsky’s eccentricities but I feared he was making . . . enemies. In the group.”

A door across the room clicked open and Miles’s troubled and pensive gaze was instantly smoothed out as he smiled over Sarah’s left shoulder. His hand moved from Sarah’s elbow to the small of her back as he led her away from the window. “Ah, good. Here are two more of our family. Sarah Weston, meet Bernard Plummer and Miss Shuziko Oshiro.”

They made an almost comically contrasting couple. Bernard Plummer was well over six feet and massively built. He sported a luxurious mustache and was clad—there was really no other word for it—in a kind of medieval cape. Shuziko Oshiro barely came up to his shoulder despite at least five inches worth of spiky heels. She was impeccably dressed in a gold suit with a green-and-gold-flowered scarf wrapped around her throat.

“They are Rococo and Weapons,” Miles added. “And Miss Weston is Beethoven, of course.”

Bernard Plummer barely glanced at Sarah before launching into a complicated story about a wrangle with certain imbecile customs officials. He waved enormous hands that looked more than capable of handling pikes, staves, and battering rams. Miles at once became extremely businesslike and whipped out a cell phone.

“Sarah,” he said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to pick up our tour later. And I need to bring you up to speed on what you’ll be working with. Let’s meet tomorrow morning. Get some rest today.” Miles, with Bernard at his heels, left the room as Sarah turned to the delicate Japanese woman.

“So, Rococo?” Sarah said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say and her mind was still sorting through the conversation with Miles.

“Ah, shit, no,” the Japanese woman said, in a thick and unmistakable Texas drawl. “Rococo is Bernie. And don’t get him started, girl, because once you do I swear to Gawd it’ll be hours of descriptions of funny-lookin’ snuff boxes. I’m Weapons, honey. Guns, baby. Guns.”

•   •   •

A
n hour later Shuziko—“call me Suzi”—and Sarah were in the cramped kitchen of Lobkowicz Palace sipping beers from the Lobkowicz family’s brewery. Here, as elsewhere in the palace, construction was in full swing, and Sarah sat on a stepladder while Suzi chopped vegetables. Sarah offered to help, but it was clear that Suzi had extremely precise ideas about slicing and dicing.

After Miles and Bernard had left them, Suzi led Sarah through a whirlwind tour of the rest of the rooms, moving at top speed despite her five-inch heels, and chattering a mile a minute.

Then they had gone to Suzi’s room so Suzi could change, although first Suzi asked Sarah to take her picture—smiling primly by a window—so Suzi could send it to her mother in Dallas. “She likes to see me looking all ladylike,” Suzi explained. “I had a meeting with the Minister of Culture, so I hauled out the old war paint. My mom’s a real typical Texan. I think she’s still hopin’ I’ll go back to pageants ando pd a mee twirling.”

“Twirling?” Sarah laughed, as Suzi stripped down to a g-string, pulling out a pair of karate pants and a Pokémon T-shirt and tossing them on the bed.

“Rifles! That’s where it all started for me. I was seven, eight years old and twirling these old guns: the Winchester Model 1866, British Enfield 1853, the Sharps Rifle. People freaked out, watching this little Japanese kid hurling these big ole rifles around. Man, I loved those guns. I won every pageant I entered. They probably thought I would shoot ’em down if they didn’t give me the tiara.”

Now, as Suzi chopped, Sarah sipped her beer and tried steering the conversation away from firearms toward the other academics at the palace. Unfortunately, Suzi had spent most of her time at Roudnice, the massive family ancestral home fifty kilometers north of Prague where the weapons were stored. Suzi did, however, have a little bit of gossip to share about (Prince) Max.

“I had a girlfriend who knew him at Yale,” Suzi said, picking up a meat cleaver, tossing it up in the air, catching it neatly by the handle, and bringing it down with a swift thunk on the chicken she was dismembering. “He was in her Dostoevsky seminar. She thought he was a freaky loner type, you know, the kind who’s memorized
Crime and Punishment
? I’d stay away from him if I were you.”

“Not my type,” said Sarah.

“Oh yeah?” Suzi asked, leering at Sarah and flipping her cleaver again. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Not my type of
guy
,” Sarah amended firmly.

“C’est la fuckin’ vie,” Suzi sighed. “It’s gonna be a long hot summer.”

Sarah was glad they had gotten that cleared up. She liked that the team here at the palace was clearly a little unusual. Suzi was a force to be reckoned with. The girl had dismantled four chickens in about three minutes.

“Anyway,” Suzi chattered on. “You’re gonna be up to your pretty eyes in Beethoven, right? Too bad about the other guy. He was some kind of a drug addict, I heard.”

“What?” Sarah almost did a spit-take with her lager. “Professor Sherbatsky a drug addict? No way.”

“That’s what Douglas told me.” Suzi leaned over her cutting board confidentially. “The Croll paintings guy? Douglas Sexton. Or was it Daphne who told me? Anyway, I’m glad you’re here, girl, even if you ain’t on my team exactly.” Shuziko set down her cleaver. “You’re about to meet,” she said dramatically, “just about the craziest group of people you can imagine. And there’s something . . . going on here. Something . . . kind of
off
, if you know what I mean.”

“Please don’t start in on the hell portals.”

“Hell portals?”

“I am so glad you have no idea what I’m talking about.” Sarah was about to ask Shuziko to explain what it was she
did
mean, but Suzi grabbed an enormous copper dinner bell and informed Sarah that if she wanted to take a shower, now was the best time to grab a free bathroom. Shuziko swung the bell in a wild arc above her head.

“Half hour till chow time!” she yelled.

And it was as if the cacophony rattled something loose in Sarah’s own brain, pushed through the fog and disorientation. Why had she been so slow?

There
was
something off here.

Miles Wolfmann had said that Sherbatsky had been making enemies in the group. What if someone had forced him to jump out of the window? Threatened him in some way? It was hard to imagine the professor as a drug addict. Maybe someon
e had drugged him? It might not have been a suicide.

It could have been murder.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone got pushed out a window in Prague. It was definitely time to meet the other people staying in the palace.