City of Lost Dreams (3 page)

“Very funny.” Max joined her at the rail. “Nico has become quite the ventriloquist. It’s one of his less amusing talents.”

But through the light of the torches surrounding their table, they could both see someone struggling in the water just below them. Max called to one of the waiters, then pulled out his phone. Sarah looked down at the water, saw the white flash of a hand shoot up, then saw it disappear. The person wasn’t that far away, and Sarah couldn’t just stand there and watch someone drown right in front of her. There wouldn’t be much time. She kicked off her shoes, climbed up on the railing, and dove in. The water was freezing. She surfaced, spluttering.

“There,” called Nico, grabbing one of the torches and holding it out over the water.

Sarah paused for a fraction of a second to get her bearings, then kicked hard in the direction Nico was pointing to, trying to remember everything she could from high school lifesaving class.

It was nearly impossible to see anything in the water. Floating cans and plastic water bottles knocked into her head. The current was swift, carrying her close to the middle of the river. Sarah thought she could hear the sound of oarlocks on a rowboat, but when she yelled, no one answered.

Then she heard a gasp and a choked cry, close.

“Hey!” she shouted, stroking toward the splashing figure. A man.

Sarah ducked under the water and came up next to him, reaching to get an arm around his neck. The man panicked and, flailing, fought her at first, and she was pushed momentarily underneath the water. Sarah yelled versions of “It’s okay” and “Stop kicking me” in as many languages as she could remember. When she got to
“Arrête!”
and then, more absurdly,
“Pax!”
the man finally went limp and let himself be towed along. Sarah wondered if he was dead. He was wearing something incredibly heavy that slowed her down and nearly exhausted her strength—a sleeping bag? Who jumped into the river wearing a sleeping bag?

Now she was having to swim against the current, burdened, and the distance suddenly seemed impossibly great. She could hear the voices on the shore, but she was growing tired very quickly. It occurred to her that many people who jumped into rivers to save others drowned themselves. Her legs felt heavy and it was getting hard to keep her chin above the water. She had a minute, maybe two, before she would have to drop the man and save herself. If she could. His long beard had wrapped itself around her arm like a manacle.

Again Sarah heard the creak of oars in an oarlock. Someone was definitely out here. Maybe Max had found a boat. She called out again. No answer.

And then,
ping.

Something hit the water next to her head.

Sarah recognized the next sound. A gun being cocked.

Ping. Ping.

She dove under water, pulling the man with her. Fear mixed with outrage in her brain.
Bullets? Are you fucking kidding me?
Was this how she was going to die? Wearing out-of-season snowman underwear? There was so much she hadn’t achieved yet, professionally. Who would remember her? She needed more time!

Who would help Pols?

Stop it.
It was Pols’s voice in her head.
Don’t think. Swim.

Sarah opened her eyes as her face emerged from the water, took a deep breath, and kicked hard toward the lights of the restaurant. She heard the creak of oarlocks again and ducked under the water, still kicking, still towing, until her lungs were depleted.

“Sarah!”

Max. Max was in the water.

“I’m here.” She moved forward, towing her burden. “I’m here! Someone’s shooting.”

Max grabbed her hard around the ribs, almost polishing her off, but he had also brought a float ring. Together, dragging the man, they moved toward the wharf, where Nico and the entire staff and clientele of the restaurant were ready to help pull them out. One of the waiters worked to revive the man, breathing into his mouth, as Sarah lay on her side, gasping. Shock would set in soon, she knew, and she would begin to shiver. A waiter wrapped table linens around her, and Max, dripping wet, was rubbing her arms and telling her she was amazing through his own chattering teeth.

“Someone was shooting at me,” she said. She had forgotten about the way Max’s hands felt. How could she have forgotten?

“In the river?” asked Max. “Are you sure? I didn’t hear shots.”

“Yes,” she choked out. “I heard the gun. Then bullets . . . hitting water.”

Max frowned, staring out over the Vltava. Sarah listened to the crowd of Czechs and tourists buzzing around the man the way people did when something awful happened, like a flock of wild turkeys in the presence of a snake. She tried to say more but she was cold and exhausted. And Max being so close to her, touching her, was confusing. She heard sirens in the distance and looked over at the man, catching a glimpse of his long scraggly hair and beard. What she had taken for a sleeping bag was actually a heavy brown embroidered cloak over robes. Some kind of priest? Or was it a costume? The man wasn’t moving. Nico caught Sarah’s eye and shook his head.

So her efforts had been in vain. The last of the adrenaline left her body and she began to shake. Max put his arms around her.

“You were so fast,” he said. “And I could see you . . . but then I couldn’t . . . and I jumped in, and I thought . . . she can’t . . . I have to tell her . . .”

“It was stupid of me,” said Sarah. “I don’t know what I was thinking. . . .”

Wait. What were they talking about?
Max didn’t smell like gardenias now. He smelled like foul river water, but underneath that, it was him. Max. His smell was still intoxicating. She was going to kiss him. He seemed instantly aware of her desire and, as always, met it with his own. His face, his lips, were close to hers. They had just jumped into one river, why not another? She had just chosen life over death. How much time did any of them have?

“
Ack
.” The bearded man suddenly opened his eyes and coughed up a lungful of brackish water. “
Bluuuuck
.” The crowd murmured, pressing forward. Max ordered them back. The man struggled to sit up, turning his head and looking straight at Sarah. His features were fine, his eyes a very pale blue. He said something Sarah couldn’t understand in a thick, strangled voice, then closed his eyes.

The waiter felt for the man’s neck, and began performing CPR, but after a few minutes Sarah could see that it was no use. The man was dead.

“Max? Max?”

A red-headed woman, wearing a long white coat and gloves, pushed her way through the crowd to where Max was crouched next to Sarah. He immediately let go of her and stood up.

“Max, what happened?” The woman grabbed his arm. “Are you all right? My God, look at you. You’re soaking.” The woman’s accent was the kind of plummy, drawly English that Sarah associated with BBC news presenters and Agatha Christie mysteries. “Harriet,” said Max.

Harriet began ordering people about, calling for a blanket for Max, and brandy.

An ambulance arrived. Sarah was given a thermal wrap and had her vitals tested. A technician complimented her on her blood pressure as Max explained the events to Harriet. “Sarah managed to pull the man from the river, but . . .”

“My God,” the woman murmured, stroking his arm. Now that circulation had returned to her body, Sarah had time to take in Max’s new girlfriend. Harriet’s red hair cascaded down her back in a cluster of perfectly disorganized pre-Raphaelite curls. Her white coat buttoned tightly around her waist, then flared out. Her gloves, Sarah saw, had actual gauntlets. Where did she shop? The Edwardian Gap? Sarah took a guess that Harriet did not wear off-season snowman underwear. Probably silk stockings and garters. Sarah called Nico over to her.

“What did he say?” she asked. “The man. Before he died. Could you understand him?”

“He said that he was John of Nepomuk,” Nico whispered in her ear, “and that he was pushed.”

 • • • 

T
he ambulance took the dead man away. Sarah told the police about the shots, and they notified the water patrol. Sarah was formally introduced to Harriet, which was awkward, since Sarah was still wet and reeking of Vltava, and Harriet was wearing white gloves. The two women nodded at each other.

“Nico, get Sarah back to my place,” Max said, tossing a set of keys at the little man. “I’ll be along in a minute.” They left him to the tender ministrations of Harriet, and Nico drove her to Max’s “place”—the Lobkowicz family palace at Prague Castle that Max had converted to a museum, where Max kept a private apartment.

Sarah noted the feminine toiletries in Max’s bathroom. Harriet seemed quite ensconced. When she finished showering, she saw that Nico had rather wickedly laid out a choice of robes for her: a man’s dressing gown in heavy silk, monogrammed with Max’s initials, and an ornate Japanese kimono reeking of gardenias. Sarah searched through Max’s clothes until she found a T-shirt, sweatpants, and a cashmere sweater that had escaped the busy monogrammer.

She found both Max and Nico in the living room, waiting for her. Max’s wolfhound, Moritz, rushed forward to lick her toes. Max handed her a glass of whiskey, not quite meeting her eye. Sarah was grateful for Nico’s presence, which would keep them from discussing anything too intimate.

“Did anyone call the morgue?” Sarah asked. “Do we know who that guy was?”

“He said he was John of Nepomuk,” Max reminded her. “Who was a fourteenth-century saint.”

“Right.” Sarah took a sip of whiskey. “So our guy was either high or delusional.”

Nico shrugged. “Our guy was speaking Medieval Latin and Bohemian.”

“Okay, so a language history student,” suggested Sarah. “Driven mad by declensions and pursued by the Mob for unpaid backgammon debts. Someone was
shooting
at us.”

“John of Nepomuk was pushed into the Vltava in 1393,” said Nico. “Reportedly because he wouldn’t reveal to the king what the queen’s confession was all about. John of Nepomuk is the saint of the confessional. The saint of keeping secrets.”

Max and the little man exchanged a look.

“You think it means something?” asked Max.

“Everything means something.” Nicolas narrowed his eyes. “I have been feeling for months now . . . a sense that someone is looking over my shoulder. Following me. Or maybe I am following him.”

“Maybe we’re not the only ones looking . . .” Max glanced at Sarah.

“Looking for what?” Sarah asked, although she knew the answer to this. Max believed his family had long been members of a secret Order of the Golden Fleece. The Fleece—a book that reputedly contained the answers to the deepest mysteries of life and death—had been missing since the seventeenth century. Sarah had once tried to help Max on his quest, but she couldn’t get involved in all that now. She was exhausted and more than a bit impatient. This was always the way things were in Prague: mysterious, watery, elusive. It was like the minute you got off the plane here, all firm ground dissolved. And you did crazy things. Like falling in love.

“I think it’s a warning.” Nico took a big gulp of whiskey. “A sign.”

I don
’
t want signs,
Sarah thought.
I don
’
t want warnings and strange portents. I want answers.

“I’ll be going to London tomorrow,” Nico continued. “There are some things from Philippine’s recipe that I would like to acquire for Pols. Max, I trust that this conversation will remain very much under your hat?”

“If you mean Harriet,” Max answered stiffly, after a brief glance at Sarah, “then, yes. Yes, of course. I haven’t told her anything about . . . anything. If you think Philippine’s medicines might be helpful, I’ll go through the library here and see if I can find anything related to her work. Worth a shot.”

“And Sarah—”

“I’m leaving for Vienna after Pols’s concert.” She stood up. “I have my own quest.”

“Do you have the key I gave you?” said Nico, moving forward and taking up her hand.

“Yes,” she said, confused. Sarah fingered the key she wore on a chain around her neck. The little man had given her the key during the summer she worked in Prague. As far as she knew, it only opened one door, and that door was here, not in Vienna. “Why?”

“No reason. But watch your step. You must remain
en garde
, my dear.”

“Don’t worry,” Sarah promised. “What could possibly happen to me in Vienna?”

TWO

S
arah woke early the next morning, surprisingly none the worse for having hauled a fourteenth-century saint out of the Vltava the night before. Of course she didn’t really believe the man was actually John of Nepomuk, whose statue, with its crown of golden stars, she had passed many times on the Charles Bridge. She had also seen the saint’s tomb—a mind-boggling tribute to what the Baroque could do when it got its hands on a shitload of silver—in St. Vitus’s Cathedral. No, the most likely explanation was usually the correct one: the guy she had fished out of the river was a nut job in a costume. She was also not prepared to believe that the nut job was on some sort of rival crusade to find the Golden Fleece. Max imagined mythic quests around every corner. He was about a half step away from seeing Rudolf II on a piece of toast.

Max had been very generous, putting her up for the evening at the Four Seasons, where he said the manager was a friend. Sarah appreciated the high-thread-count sheets, but was horrified by the prices on the room service menu. No eggs should cost that much unless they came with the actual chickens and a handsome farmer who would rub your feet while you ate.

Sarah opened her computer and sent an e-mail to Alessandro, her former Boston roommate, advising him of her train times. It was Alessandro who had alerted her to the work of the nanobiologist Dr. Bettina Müller. He was teaching at the University of Vienna this year, and she would be staying with him.

The events of the previous evening almost seemed like a dream now. Nico. The restaurant. The dive into the river. The shots. Saint John’s pale blue eyes staring at her. Max’s hands. The feeling that she had made a mistake in letting him go. The desire to kiss him. Harriet.

Telling herself she was allowed to be curious, Sarah had done a little Internet search on Harriet Hunter before collapsing into bed the night before.

Max’s new girlfriend was pretty famous in Britain. Her academic credentials were impeccable—her PhD was from Oxford and she had published in her field. But she was best known as the host of a popular television show,
Histories & Mysteries
. Naturally, Sarah found some episodes of it on YouTube. Dr. Hunter practiced what was called archaeological history. In her programs she re-created the banquets of seventeenth-century kings, spent the night in freezing castles, slept on a straw-tick mattress, and used a chamber pot. She squeezed her petite but well-endowed frame into corsets, donned bonnets, attempted an exit from a tiny horse-drawn carriage while wearing an enormous crinoline. She took a bath in goats’ milk, plucked a goose, fought (unloaded) pistols at dawn. She punctuated her speech with Shakespearean exclamations: “Oh, pish!” “Heigh-ho, what have we here?” “What tilly-vally!” There was nothing she wouldn’t explore, investigate, or ingest.

“It’s 1598 and Oswald Croll is writing his
Basilica chymica
here in Prague,” ran one documentary clip. Dr. Harriet was dressed in a floor-length magus robe and stood before a table of glass beakers and pewter dishes. “We can—if we dare—follow his instructions for the making of a magical amulet: two ounces of dried toads ground to a fine powder, one complete menstruum of a virgin, one dram of unpierced pearls, one dram of coral, two scruples of Eastern saffron . . .” Apparently Dr. Harriet had not dared to try—or, more likely, was prevented from quaffing on-air—the collected monthly of some suitably innocent schoolgirl, but she promised her viewers that Croll believed his amulet was a surefire preventative from diseases both astral and venereal.

All of this had earned the historian a raft of snarky comments from her colleagues, who accused her of pandering, of trivializing history, of sensationalism, and of—horror of horrors—bad taste. The kind of things that generally got said of any academic who achieved a modicum of fame, published something more than five people wanted to read, or wore lipstick.

But really, the woman was impressive.

And, Sarah had to admit, a good choice for Max, who was also sort of an odd duck. Perhaps the sudden rush of feelings for Max was just the result of having a near-death experience, Sarah thought, as she set herself firmly toward Josefov, where Pollina’s parents kept an apartment for their daughter. Her brain had been flooded with chemicals and she hadn’t been thinking clearly. Anyway, she would be leaving for Vienna in the afternoon. Better for everyone.

 • • • 

“T
hey tell us her immune system no good, and it worse if she has stress. So we try not to worry her. We act normal.”

Pollina’s caretaker, Jose Nieto, was waiting for Sarah on a street of glassware shops, holding the leash of Pollina’s elderly mastiff, Boris. Jose told her that the girl did not know how sick she was, and they needed to keep it that way.

“But she knows how she
feels
,” Sarah argued. She was skeptical, anyway, about the ability of anyone to hide things from Pols. The girl’s blindness—and possibly her genius—had rendered her exceptionally observant. A bus pulled up and discharged a single-file line of young Chinese women in pink velour tracksuits. Prague was beginning to feel like a Hogarth painting entitled
The Triumph of Capitalism
.

“She say she feel fine, fine, fine. But when she think no one hear, she cough
bad
.” Jose had looked after Pollina since birth. Now he had dark circles under his eyes. “Her parents, they just leave,” he continued. “They go to Afghanistan for the archaeology. They nice people, but they don’t worry! Always I see rich people worry about stupid thing like if bread has gluten, but they just say, ‘Oh, darling, you must rest and not work so hard.’ They no understand her.”

The first-floor apartment was large and luxurious, though Sarah had to assume that while the art had been chosen by Pollina’s parents, the decorative touches had been added by Jose, who had a flair for whimsy. A row of Egyptian statues sported tiny bandanas. Sunglasses and a pipe had been unceremoniously added to an African ceremony mask. The crucifixes, however, had been left in their original state.

Pollina was seated at a grand piano. She was playing a little tune of just five notes over and over again, as if in a trance: E. B. C. A. G.

Sarah, whose mind automatically sought to classify these things, didn’t recognize the strangely compelling little passage, and wasn’t even sure which key the girl was playing in. Pollina stopped abruptly.

“Why did you break Max’s heart?” Pols demanded without preamble.

“I brought doughnuts from Boston.” Sarah placed the carton of requested Dunkin’ Donuts on the coffee table for the expats. Sarah was all too familiar with Pols’s blunt opinions. The last time they had spoken, the target had been her career. Was Sarah
sure
that teaching was
really
what she wanted to do with her understanding of music? Pols had an unerring nose for weak spots.

“I thought,” Pols continued now, coming forward and touching Sarah’s hand in greeting, “that people strove their whole lives to find love.”

Sarah sighed. Pollina was a genius, but she sometimes got very romantic notions into her head and she
was
only thirteen. How to explain that love and life didn’t always go easily together? It wouldn’t be obvious to Pollina why it was so important that Sarah make her own career and place in the world before she attached herself to someone else, that she and Max were leading very different lives.

Sarah kept her tone light. “Let’s face it, I’m no princess.”

Pols absorbed this as she munched on a doughnut. The changes in the girl were dramatic, but Sarah found them difficult to assess. Was her friend older looking because she was in fact heading into full teenager status, or had her illness aged her prematurely? She was not much taller, still slight, but her face had definitely lost its doll-like roundness. She was moving slowly, but then Pols always moved slowly, unless she was playing the piano or violin, when she was capable of Dervish-like agility and Titanic power.

“I see you as a conductor,” Pols said at last, having demolished the doughnut. “When I’m done with my opera you should conduct it.”

“Was that what you were playing when I came in?”

“Yes. That was the theme.” Pols straightened her back. “The whole thing flows from those five notes, which are encrypted throughout the entire work. Or will be.”

“What’s your libretto?”

“I’m writing it myself. But I need to work fast. Mozart was twelve when he wrote
Bastien und Bastienne
and
La finta semplice
.”

“Well, those weren’t great operas.”
But it’s good that she’s feeling competitive,
Sarah thought.
She’s a fighter.

“No, not truly great. They showed ambition but not compassion. The music was there, but emotionally he was still immature,” said Pols. “Like you, kind of.”

 • • • 

A
t noon, Sarah slipped into the back row of Lobkowicz Palace Museum’s Music Room. The 7th Prince Lobkowicz had been a major supporter of Ludwig van Beethoven. Word had apparently gotten around that the current Lobkowicz was patron to another extraordinary genius. The place was packed.

I’ll know how Pols really feels,
Sarah thought,
when I hear her play
.

Harriet Hunter took the seat next to Sarah, togged out today in a green corduroy frock coat buttoned over a white silk blouse and green and black vest, with narrow black velvet pants. A sort of nineteenth-century cross-dressed look. You had to give the woman points for style.

“How are you feeling?” Harriet whispered, searching Sarah’s face. “After your plunge last night? Max said you were into the river before anyone else had sorted out what was happening. And you think someone was shooting at you?”

“I might have been mistaken about that,” Sarah said, hedging. “There was a lot going on.” So Max had told Harriet about the gunshots, even though Nico had counseled discretion?

“Max said you’re working on a book?” Sarah asked Harriet, hoping to steer the conversation away from drowning madmen and mysterious plots.

“A novel.” Harriet smiled. “Although it requires a great deal of research. My heroine is Elizabeth Weston—the poet? They called her ‘Westonia.’ No relation of yours, Max says.”

“Weston is a common name,” Sarah said, though the name Westonia had given her a bit of a jolt.

“In her day Elizabeth Weston was more famous than Shakespeare,” said Harriet. “I’m taking a bit of a risk, imagining her as a modern woman, looking back at her life and accomplishments here in Prague. But it’s atrocious she’s been so forgotten. I’m hoping to really make her come alive for a modern audience.”

“Sounds great,” said Sarah.
Although in my experience,
she thought,
it’s not hard to make history come alive in Prague. The hard part is making history stay dead
.

According to Nico, Westonia had been the name Tycho Brahe had given to one of his little alchemical experiments, the result of which had been a perception-expanding drug that both Sarah and Max had taken. Westonia allowed you to see the past, see it so clearly that it was like time traveling. Nico had said that Brahe had named the drug after Elizabeth Weston, though Sarah had no idea why. She wondered if Max had said anything to Harriet about it. Probably not. The whole thing was pretty hard to believe and anyway the ingredients for making it were all gone.

Harriet squinted at her program. Sarah wondered if she would take an eyeglass on a velvet ribbon from her waistcoat pocket. “What does dear Pollina have in store for us today?” Harriet murmured. “Oh God. Strauss. Well, we must endure. That’s for you, is it? I hear you’re off to Vienna. I admit I find Vienna something of a sphinx. You’ll meet quite a lot of them there. Sphinxes. And not just on buildings and lampposts.”

Sarah smiled politely.

“Oh, you are prepared,” Harriet laughed. “That was a very Viennese smile. Giving away nothing and concealing everything.”

Max came and sat down on the other side of Harriet, who took his hand.
They make a nice couple,
Sarah told herself sternly, hoping she wouldn’t be forced to make small talk, since at the sight of Max all her resolution dissolved and she had to admit there was just a tiny possibility that she might leap over Ms.
Masterpiece Theatre
and grab Max by his monogrammed wrists and tell him that—

Fortunately a hush fell over the room as a tall, silver-haired woman carrying a violin entered the Music Room, followed by Pols, walking slowly with one arm on a uniformed museum guard. The crowd instantly grew silent and attentive as the young girl seated herself at the piano and the violinist arranged her own music on a stand in front of her.

The first piece—“Vienna Blood” by Johann Strauss II—was perhaps better translated as “Vienna Spirit.” It was Vienna as it liked to think of itself: sprightly, charming, and sensual. But Pols seemed to be finding something else in the music, as if the charm of Vienna concealed something broken. She was giving the merry waltz an almost sinister quality, revealing a darker truth. Pollina then launched into Schumann’s “Träumerei,” a piece usually played slowly and introspectively. The young girl broke that convention immediately, handling the ascensions with a nervous and almost threatening pace. Next was Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 14. The ease with which Pollina played this was breathtaking, but Sarah saw she was distracted. Her thin face occasionally broke into frowns or smiles, as if she were conducting a conversation with the composer, sometimes praising and sometimes scolding. The violinist and a teenage cellist wearing a yarmulke and a prayer shawl joined for the final offering: Luigi’s Piano Trio, op. 97. (Sarah always thought of Ludwig van Beethoven by his favorite nickname.) According to a contemporary account of Beethoven’s performance at the premiere, “In
forte
passages the poor deaf man pounded on the keys until the strings jangled, and in
piano
he played so softly that whole groups of notes were omitted.” It had marked Luigi’s last public performance as a pianist.