City of Lost Dreams (2 page)

ONE

S
arah Weston heard the splash just as Nico got to the part in the story about the gorilla.

Her plane from Boston was meant to arrive in Prague in the morning, but a series of delays and a missed connecting flight in Heathrow had made her late, which was upsetting as she was on a very particular mission. Hoping to at least get a little background on the situation in Prague, Sarah decided to call upon a master thief and repository of secrets great and small. Nicolas Pertusato suggested she join him at Barbora a Katerina, a chic new restaurant on the banks of the Vltava River.

“We will sit outside and have a good gossip,” Nico said when she arrived. “It is unseasonably warm for late October. You can admire the view and I can admire you. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you. I intend to bask.”

In a sand-colored cashmere suit and polka-dot silk tie, Nicolas was easily the best-dressed man in the restaurant. He was also the shortest, being a dwarf, a term he preferred to the more politically correct “little person.”

Barbora a Katerina had evidently taken its name from the saints Barbara and Catherine, whose images appeared on the restaurant walls and the menus, where the two saints appeared to be somewhat critically eyeing each other’s jewels. (Babs had the nicer brooch, Cathy the prettier tiara.) The setting was exquisite, with the Charles Bridge throwing golden shadows across the river, and Prague Castle on its hill, dramatically lit in emerald green, but Sarah’s mind was on other things.

“Is it a good sign or a bad sign that Pols is in bed by eight?” Sarah asked as she began her interrogation. “How is her energy? Is she eating?”

“You will see Pollina tomorrow.” Nico reached over and patted her hand.

“Yes, but I’m leaving for Vienna in the afternoon,” Sarah reminded him. “I just want to get as clear a picture as possible of how she’s responding to the last round of medications so I can make a convincing case to Dr. Müller.”

Pollina Rutherford, a thirteen-year-old blind musical prodigy of astounding talent, had moved to Prague from Boston a year earlier. The girl had never been of vigorous health and had lately been plagued by a series of lung infections. In the past several months, these had become much more serious. Sarah had frantically researched everything related to Pols’s illness, a rare autoimmune disorder that seemed to be caused by a malfunction on chromosome 20. When she heard about a nanobiologist at the University of Vienna who was developing a promising new drug targeting mutations in chromosome 20, she had contacted her about enrolling Pols in a trial. And when Dr. Müller had turned them down, Sarah had dropped everything to make this trip to Vienna to change the woman’s mind.

It wasn’t easy for Sarah to explain her emotions where Pollina was concerned. She had begun tutoring her when she was in high school and Pols was only four, though it was clear from the beginning that in many ways it was the younger girl who was the older soul. Their backgrounds were entirely different. Sarah had grown up in working-class South Boston, had lost her dad when she was nine, had blazed through high school, college, and grad school, all the way to, at age twenty-five, a PhD in neuromusicology on a mixture of ambition and passion. Before coming to Prague, Pollina had spent most of her young life inside a Back Bay mansion, cared for by a devoted but eccentric Mexican housekeeper and left largely to her own devices by her wealthy dilettante parents. But music had erased the disparity of their ages and their experiences. Music, and a sort of kindred fierceness they recognized in each other.

Cocktails arrived at the table. Sarah’s came garnished with a large wheel of orange slice, and the olive in Nico’s glass was pierced with a giant plastic sword.

“I ordered you the Catheratini,” Nico explained. “The orange is meant to symbolize the wheel that the unfortunate Saint Catherine was tortured upon, though this is not explained on the menu and perhaps the symbolism is lost on some. My Barbatini, you may note, contains a sword.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Barbara was decapitated.”

“By her own father, poor dear. Admit. Impiety tastes delicious. I’m glad you like it, as I own a share in this place. A side venture of mine. I thought it would be amusing, but I fear that, like everything else, it will end by being either a bore or a heartbreak.”

Sarah put down her Catheratini. She had been so caught up in her concern over seeing Pols that she was only now noticing that the little man didn’t look particularly well himself.

But Nico waved off her questions with a hand, attributing his low spirits to the modern climate of political correctness that inhibited flirtation with the miniskirted female waitstaff, and ordered a bottle of Roudnice red.

“And so, you go to Vienna tomorrow,” he continued. “To bully the nanobiologist into helping our Pollina?”

“I think this Dr. Müller is just being cautious”—Sarah leaned forward—“because Pols’s immune system is very compromised. Maybe she doesn’t want to take a risk and potentially skew her results.”

“And you have never taken no for an answer.”

“I am not leaving Vienna until that bitch says yes.” Sarah smiled. Nico raised his glass to her.

“Oksana, too, thinks targeting the chromosome itself might be helpful.” Nico sighed. Nico’s wife, Oksana, a nurse, was overseeing Pols’s care. “But these are all drugs of the future, and, as you know, I have much more experience with drugs of the past. I, too, want to make an experiment.”

“Are we talking alchemy here?” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “I am not letting you give Pols ground-up narwhal horn.”

“Nonsense.” Nico poured himself another glass of wine. “I haven’t been able to get my hands on that for two centuries.”

Though he appeared to be in his mid-forties, Nico insisted to his confidants that he was four hundred years old, rendered immortal by the astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1601 in an alchemical experiment gone awry. Sarah was never sure what to believe when Nico was around. What was indisputable was that Nico knew a lot about a great number of things, including chemistry. Sarah herself had been the beneficiary of a rather unusual drug he had replicated. She knew what he could do. But this was Pollina. And it wasn’t a game.

“I have found something.” Nico lowered his voice. He looked around the restaurant, then slid an object across the table, wrapped in a napkin. Sarah unfolded it to reveal a book.

The cover featured a cartoon drawing of a white-bearded man dressed in what looked like a green jumpsuit, sporting an enormous Druidic headpiece topped with a crescent moon, and carrying a flaming torch. Behind the Druid, a few badly drawn goats wandered across a hilly background. The sky was lit by a rainbow, across which ran the title:
The Every Soul’s Guide to Alchemy! 50 Fun Recipes for Living, Loving, and Levitating!

“We’re joking, right?” Sarah looked up.

“Nay.”

“You want to use this on Pollina?” Sarah flipped the book open and read at random.
“‘We must shut off our rational, doubting, linear modal selves and listen to the harmonies contained in the Creator’s majestic dance!’”

“I know,” Nico sniffed. “The usual dreadful hippie twaddle. I was attracted to the cover, which I believe depicts William Price of Llantrisant, whom I knew. A darling man, and quite cheerful, for a Druid. Imagine my surprise when I’m leafing through it, merely to entertain myself with all the drivel, and I find . . .” Nico flipped the pages and pointed.

“‘
The Will to Heal
, by Philippine Welser,’” Sarah read. Under the title was a list of ingredients involving a lot of symbols and drawings.

“Whoever put this silly book together,” Nico explained, “decided to throw in an actual alchemical formula. In the author’s acknowledgments I found a sentence thanking the von Hohenlohe family, so I suspect he got it from them. The von Hohenlohes’ castle was conferred on them by Ferdinand of Tyrol, and they have what remains of Ferdinand’s
Kunstkammer
, which includes Philippine’s book of medicines. The point is, it’s real. It’s an actual recipe of Philippine Welser.”

“Okay, for those of us who lack your colossal scholarship . . . ?”

Nico sighed. “Philippine Welser. The wife of Ferdinand, uncle of Emperor Rudolf II.”

“Oh, God. Not Rudy again.” Tales of Rudolf’s eccentricities were as ubiquitous in Prague as inexpensive beer and marionettes.

Nico, unperturbed, continued on. “An archduke, Ferdinand, married Philippine, a commoner, in secret. She was a talented healer and became famous in the Tyrol as something of a good witch. Most of her formulae were lost, and what has survived is, as I said, in the hands of a very close-lipped family. This is her tonic to incite the process of healing. A sort of spark to the engine. Pollina’s immune system is sluggish. It needs to be awakened.”

“Nico . . .” Sarah growled. Every skeptical fiber of her being was on guard.

“I’m not going to sit here and do nothing,” Nico said sharply. “Alchemy is my talent, and I’m going to use it.”

“Which talents are we using?”

Sarah turned to see Max Lobkowicz Anderson standing behind her chair. Sarah and Max had . . . there wasn’t an easy explanation for it—slept together by mistake, fallen in love, almost gotten killed—during the summer she worked at the museum Max had opened in Prague, which housed his family’s art and artifacts. They had kept up the affair for almost a year after she returned to Boston, until the pressure of maintaining a long-distance relationship while trying to establish a career had overwhelmed Sarah, and she had broken it off. Max, she knew, was now seeing a British historian who was researching a book in Prague. And Sarah? Lately there had been a brief but energetic fling with a tennis player. The tennis player wasn’t Max—nobody was Max—but when it came to relationships, Sarah wondered if hers was more of a serve-and-volley game. She didn’t really have time for long rallies.

Sarah stood to give Max a hug, and then collided with his chin as he went in for the double cheek kiss. Nico snorted. Sarah noted that the scent of the guy she had once fallen for now carried the unmistakable trace of another woman’s perfume. Gardenias. A flashbulb went off, briefly blinding Sarah. Max turned to the paparazzo leaning precariously over another table.

“Please, Jerzy,” said Max. “This is a private evening. If I pose for one, will you take the night off?” The photographer nodded, and Max offered his profile to the camera.

“Our little princeling has become quite the celebrity,” said Nico dryly.

“Ticket sales at the museum are up.” Max settled himself in the chair next to Sarah. “As are donations. The press is useful.” Sarah knew that Max struggled to keep his family museum afloat so that he didn’t have to sell off any of the treasures his ancestors had amassed. It wasn’t a job he had asked for, but he had taken it on as a duty to his family and to future generations. During the summer she had spent authenticating Beethoven manuscripts at his museum, Sarah had watched him struggle with the responsibility of being thirteenth in a line of princes. Now she saw that the cuffs of his dress shirt were monogrammed. Apparently, he had adapted.

“We’re talking about Pollina,” said Sarah.

Max touched her shoulder in sympathy.

“You know she’s been playing weekly concerts at the museum,” he said. “I’ve tried to get her to cut back a little, but . . .”

“I know,” said Sarah.

“I would do anything for Pols,” said Max.

They all sat in silence for a moment. Plates of roast pork and dumplings arrived, along with another bottle of wine, which Nico again largely appropriated. He began telling them about the time when, after a week of heavy rains, the Vltava had overflowed its banks and submerged several areas of the city, including the Prague Zoo. More than a thousand animals had to be evacuated in extremely dangerous and dramatic conditions, including lions, tigers, rhinos, and hippos. Nico waxed rhapsodic over the aquatic feats of Gaston the sea lion, who escaped his enclosure as the water rose and swam all the way to Dresden. He described the anguish of the Czechs, weeping for the loss of their dear old elephant Sabi, who had been put down as the water rose to her ears. Of course, Nico being Nico, this led to the tale of a young male gorilla called Pong, who went rogue during the deluge and whose breakout had been hushed up by the authorities.

“I have seen him,” Nico said. “I, and a few others for whom the tunnels below Prague hold no terrors. For that is where he lives to this day. He feeds on fruit. And, I believe, carp.”

“You’re drunk,” said Max. Sarah realized this was true. The little man was listing sideways. He had certainly imbibed enough, but Nico’s tolerance was legendary. He had once told Sarah that he had to drink solidly for nearly a month before he could become even slightly inebriated.

“I tell you I have seen his huddled form, slipping into the shadows!” Nico shouted. “And once . . .”

And that was when Sarah heard the splash, and a cry.

She looked over the railing into the inky darkness of the river, and she heard it again.

“Oh, shit.” She pushed back her chair. “I think someone might be out there in the water.”