City of Dark Magic (18 page)

TWENTY-THREE

“H
e learned to play the violin in his prison cell,” said Max. “If you focus on that sound, you can see him. His name was Dalibor of Kozojedy, and he was imprisoned for being too nicey-nice to some peasants. He’s wearing an orange tunic, but look for the violin. That’s how I know it’s him, and I know it’s 1498 because that’s when he was executed. I always see him when I stand here. Can you find him?”

“I’m trying, but I keep getting stuck on these people humping like bunnies in the backseat of a black Lada,” said Sarah. “It’s like a seventies porn film. Wow, that guy is . . . talented.”

Sarah and Max were standing in the moonlight in front of Dalibor Tower, which rose above Deer Moat. erron;. The drug had mostly worn off, but Sarah was getting little flashbacks as she and Max walked around the castle grounds, not a (present-day) soul in the place. Max was trying to teach her to hone her perceptions and not be overwhelmed, but Sarah was still finding it hard to breathe when layers upon layers of intense human activity suddenly swooped up around her. She tried peering through the windows of the black Lada, but couldn’t make out the faces of the occupants.

And then, as a light breeze stirred the candy wrappers on the cobblestones, Sarah was suddenly staring at an empty patch of pavement.

“It’s gone,” she said. It made no sense that she was not relieved. The past two hours had been the most terrifying of her entire life. She had come to in Max’s arms, muttering “everything, everything” over and over. Suzi was out of her mind with worry, but Max had convinced her to leave doctors out of it, and just get Sarah a glass of water and an aspirin.

“I don’t know what you gave her,” Suzi said. “But you gave her too much.”

Max frowned, and asked her to please be discreet. Suzi nodded, and Sarah had thought she looked a little awed. Whether at the authority in Max’s voice, or over what she had just witnessed, Sarah couldn’t tell.

Once she could stand up and walk and talk on her own without hyperventilating, Max took Sarah outside into the night air. Suzi had gone to bed muttering that she would not say anything to anyone, but that tomorrow she would be needing some explanations.

Max and Sarah had walked around the castle grounds, with flashes appearing to Sarah here and there. Max was like a little kid, leading her around by the hand excitedly, wanting to show her his great-to-the-tenth grandmother Polyxena standing up to the Protestants when they came looking for the Catholic ministers they had just thrown out the window, Tycho Brahe gazing at the sky from the palace roof, and poor depressed Kafka, hard at work on his account books in Golden Lane.

“You’re my tour guide to the past,” laughed Sarah. “Hey, let’s go over to the Riding School. I want to try to see Emperor Rudy’s lion again.”

Sarah badly wanted to get a glimpse of all these famous people and events, but the problem was, with so many people having experienced moments of intense fear, pain, joy, or longing in one place for over a thousand years, it was hard to sift through it all. It reminded her of when she was a little girl and visited her mom at work at a Beacon Hill brownstone. In the cavernous basement laundry room, rows of sheets were hung on long lines to dry. She loved to close her eyes and run through them, letting the clean linen whap her in the face. Her mom had yelled at her that she would get them dirty, but she hadn’t cared. Now Sarah had a hard time getting through the layers.

“What time is it?” Sarah asked. “I’m exhausted.”

“Just after three,” said Max. “We should go to bed.”

Sarah wondered what that meant. One thing about all your senses being heightened was that . . . well, all your senses were heightened. The smell of Max himself was enough to make her hallucinate.

She took Max’s hand and pulled him toward the statue of St. George in the courtyard between the Old Palace and St. Vitus Cathedral. The armor-clad saint was glowing inkily in the moonlight. Sarah coulht.idth="2ed no longer see any history happening around her, but the air still felt electric. Even in the cool night breeze, her skin was hot, as if she had spent the day at the beach.

She knew that tomorrow morning she would be demanding to know why Max hadn’t told her about the drug, what it was, who developed it, who knew about it, what had he seen, and a thousand other questions. But right now, she wanted to feel his skin against hers.

Sarah looked up at St. George. Rather slim and feminine, yet determined and feisty, he was looking down at her, driving his lance through the open throat of an alligator-sized winged dragon, while his well-behaved horse also stared at her appraisingly. It was as if the two of them—the saint and the horse—were reminding her that life is short, and that soon she, too, would be one of the wraiths floating around this castle. But only if she really
lived
first, otherwise there would be no trace of her at all. Only the passionate were immortal, it seemed. If you fought, screwed, screamed, laughed, or otherwise experienced life intensely, for better or for worse, you left a record. Those who lived a quiet, well-behaved, well-tempered life? Gone without a trace.

She spun around and pulled Max toward her, reaching for his belt with her hands as her mouth sought his. He had his hands under her shirt in an instant, and they were frantically all over each other, ripping their clothes in their hurry. Later, Sarah could only remember flashes of the event, Max holding her on his knees, deep inside her, his back against the statue’s base, the soles of her feet against the cold bronze; her face next to the impaled dragon’s, screaming in pleasure, Max’s face buried between her legs; him standing and holding her upside down, his head in her as she swallowed him—was that even possible, she wondered?

One thing Sarah knew for sure. The identity of her bathroom lover was no longer in doubt. It was Max.

It was the best sex of her life, and that was saying a lot. Sarah felt about great sex the way St. George felt about slaying dragons—it may not have been the main of her life’s work, but when the opportunity arose, it was a true passion. But even during great sex she always had moments when her mind broke the concentration of her body. Not this time. This time her brain was switched off, no doubt exhausted by all that it had experienced this evening, and her body was fully present, every cell given over to pleasure. When she felt her orgasm coming, she knew it would explode in every nerve ending of her entire body.

So when they were interrupted by flashlights and sirens, it was, shall we say, a bit of a downer.

•   •   •

T
he back of the patrol car smelled like vomit, and Sarah was trying with her handcuffed hands to close the buttons on her shirt, but they seemed to be missing. Max was shouting at the police officers, saying he had every right to be in the castle complex at night, and they had no right to arrest him. At one point he said angrily, “She is not a prostitute.”
Wow
, thought Sarah.
I am glad my dad did not live to see this
.

Worried and clearly awakened from sleep, Jana came down to the police station on Jungmann Square to bail them out, after Sarah had sat in a detention room for three hours with two sobbing Ukrainian teenagers in go-go boots. Sarah could not even meet Jana’s eyes; shaSquare e just whispered a small “thank you” and followed her toward her car, a tiny blue Skoda. Sarah expected to see Max waiting by the car, but Jana told her she had secured his release earlier and he had taken a taxi home. Sarah found this slightly ungallant, but couldn’t exactly be sure she wouldn’t do the same. She just wanted the night to be over.

She got in the passenger seat, closed the weirdly lightweight door with a thunk, and Jana put the tinny little car in gear and backed out of the parking space. It was just before dawn, and there was no traffic in the city center, the first time Sarah had ever seen it this way. Men with brooms and little carts were the only people out, sweeping the ice-cream wrappers off the sidewalks.

As they bumped over the cobblestones and dodged the tram tracks on the Národní, the relief of being out of jail gave way to complete mortification. She knew she was fired. Jana would certainly tell Miles, and how could Max protect her this time? Word would get back to the university at home, and not only would she never get tenure, she would be the laughingstock of the entire East Coast academic establishment. They’d be telling jokes about her at Yale. At Dartmouth, they’d name a sexual position after her. At Columbia, medievalists would snicker into their lattes about how Sarah Weston learned the hard way—the very hard way—that the dragon was a symbol of lust. She’d have to move west, maybe to some small women’s college in Idaho where they’d barely have heard of Prague, and Beethoven was merely Schroeder’s hero. There would be no more men. She’d be like some modern-day Hester Prynne, condemned never to have sex again.

They crossed Legion Bridge, and Sarah thought about flinging open the door of the Skoda and jumping into the cold black water below. It was all so awful that she started to giggle, and when Jana shot her a look, she began to laugh uncontrollably.

“I’ve never been so embarrassed in my entire life,” said Sarah at last. “Did you see the faces of the cops? They were
disgusted
.”

“Especiall
y when I told them that Max really was who he said he was,” agreed Jana, now starting to laugh herself.

“ ‘Lobkowicz? Lobkowicz? This man’s name is Anderson!’ ” Sarah imitated the security guards and police officers who had surrounded, disentangled, and pulled them to their feet. “ ‘No Lobkowicz would ever defile St. George in this way! Why, the Lobkowiczes are members of the Order of the Golden Fleece! These people are like dogs!’ ”

“You two are terrible,” said Jana, chuckling. “Love makes people so stupid.”

At that, Sarah’s laughter ended abruptly and she fell silent. Jana drove on, passing the Carmelite monastery that housed the Holy Infant of Prague, the sun rose, and the city began its day.

TWENTY-FOUR

“S
arah!” shouted Pols, from what sounded like the bottom of a pool. Sarah had slept for all of two hours, then been awakened by Daphne, who had rather coldly informed her that her “visitors” had pranced unannounced into Daphne’s workspace.

“Visitors?” Sarah had responded groggily. “I’m not expecting any visitors. . . .” She had rolled oveaSq"2em">

“A blind girl, a dog, and a Mexican?” snapped Daphne. “It’s like a knock-knock joke.” Sarah almost fell out of bed—
what the hell were Pols and Jose doing here, in Prague? And Boris?!

“Tell them not to move! I’ll be right there!” she told Daphne’s retreating haughty back. She quickly splashed cold water on her face and made her way upstairs.

Last night all of her senses had been alive, and today they all felt muted and a little sore. The sunlight hurt her eyes, and sounds seemed far away, as if she had been at a rock concert. She couldn’t really smell anything, and the slice of toast she shoved into her mouth to settle her stomach on her way through the kitchen tasted like wood.

“Sarah!” shouted Pols again.

“I’m here,” said Sarah, hugging the little girl, who was noticeably taller and thinner. “But what on earth are you doing here?”

“We’ve been invited,” said Pols. “Tell her, Jose.”

Sarah smiled at Jose, who had chosen for his traveling costume a pair of pale blue tuxedo pants, a tailcoat, and a long, fringed scarf. Pols, it seemed, had also brought along her mastiff, Boris, who wore a jaunty orange bib around his massive rib cage that proclaimed him to be a service dog. (A clever move on Pols’s part: Boris had earned his bib during a brief tenure in his youth as a K-9 Detection dog in Bosnia. He was useless as a Seeing Eye dog, but if there were any land mines in Prague he would sniff them out.)

“There’s a gathering of child prodigies here in Prague,” said Jose. “Organized by the Vienna Symphony and the Czech Philharmonic. We’re playing at the Rudolfinum tomorrow night.”

“You’re performing?” Sarah asked Pols.

“Yes. It’s some horrible competition.”

“I thought you hated performing.”

Pollina gave a little shrug and a cough. “I do, but I missed you and you needed me, so I took their invitation and came.”

Sarah laughed at the idea that she needed a blind eleven-year-old, but the truth was, she was absurdly glad to see Pollina. They left Jose to enjoy the ecstasies of St. Vitus Cathedral and Sarah took Pols and Boris out to the public gardens near the old handball courts. The fresh air might help with that cough, and the gardens weren’t often crowded. She thought Pols might enjoy the Singing Fountain in front of the Royal Summer Palace.

They sat on a bench facing the arching loggia of the palace.

“Something’s happening, isn’t it?” asked Pols.

Sarah hesitated to drag Pols into whatever was going on.

“I knew it was, and if you don’t tell me, I’ll hold my breath until I fall over. You’ll probably be arrested for child abuse.”

Sarah laughed at Pols’s dry delivery of this threat. She took a deep breath and told Pols everything—well, almost everything. She left out the embarrassing sex with Max in the bathroom, and by the statue. She just said they were caught trespassing at night.

Sherbatsky’s death, the cross in her bed, Sherbatsky’s note about the New Year’s Eve letter from Prince Lobkowicz to LVB that she still couldn’t find, the Aztec amulet, the letter to Max from the concierge in Venice, the letter to Yuri Bespalov complaining about missing items, Andy’s death, the fact that she and Max were in fourth grade together but he had hidden that from her and sent Nicolas to check her out. Taking another deep breath, she even told Pols about the mysterious drug that had allowed her to visit the past—or the energy of the past. She left out the gruesome visions and concentrated on the part where she had seen Beethoven, heard him speak, had almost seen him play.

“He actually said the words ‘Immortal Beloved,’” she told Pols. “And it felt like he was saying them to
me
.”

That should have set Pols going, but strangely, she seemed less interested in this than she was in the letter to Yuri Bespalov and the death of Andy Blackman, who had been spying on Miles.

“I’ve been doing a little investigating of my own,” Pols said, reaching down to pet Boris’s enormous head. “Matt’s teaching me all about how to do historical research on my voice-activated computer.” Sarah knew that Pols’s tutor had orders to teach her anything she wanted to know, but Sarah sometimes worried that he should have been sticking to practical things like getting around in the world. And yet, Pols had made it to Prague, with certainly minimal help from Jose and Boris.

“After you got the job here I decided we should follow the trail of the Lobkowicz property distribution,” said Pols. “I found out the Nazis kept records, but things were done kind of casually under the communists. Officially, pieces were sent to places like the Hermitage and the Pushkin on loan, but often they were handed to various high-ranking party members as gifts or bribes. The tenth-century Evangeliarium for example, went to Brezhnev and then on to his mistress, and was recovered at auction in Murmansk in 2008 and returned to the family.”

Pols had a fit of coughing. Boris whined and put his head in Pollina’s lap, licking her hand.

“Have you seen a doctor?” Sarah asked, when the girl had caught her breath.

“The vast majority of the collection, however,” Pols continued, ignoring her, “stayed here in what was then Czechoslovakia. It was under the control of the National Museum, which was housed in the building you’re now working and living in. From 1965 to 1980, the head of the National Museum was Yuri Bespalov, who was a KGB employee.”

Sarah frowned. “Pols,” she said. “I looked up Bespalov after I found that letter to him in the box at the Nela library. I saw that he was head of the museum. It didn’t say anything about him being KGB.”

“It’s fairly well-known in certain circles.” Pols’s lower lip jutted out.

“Circles you run in?”

Pols sighed. “Sarah. Haven’t you heard of the Internet?”

“Okay, okay,” Sarah smiled. “Go on.”

“I’ve been learning all about the restitution process and came across this whole article on the board of the American-Czech Cultural Alliance. The article mentioned that Charlotte Yates sits on the board, and seeing how she’s a powerful senator and all I got cnd boaurious. Because, you know,
why
? What’s her interest in Czech culture? It’s not like she just found out she’s of Czech descent like Madeleine Albright or something. And then Matt found a photograph of her and Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti together. She’s from the Venice branch of the family. They thought they were the rightful heirs.”

“Yes, I know about Elisa,” said Sarah, not wanting to tell Pols about Nicolas’s insinuations. Not after what had happened under, around, and against St. George.

“The weird thing is,” Pols continued, “when Matt and I checked back two days later the photo was gone.”

“Maybe you just weren’t looking in the right place.”

“No, it was
gone
. And you know how the Internet is—things never really disappear. But this one did. It’s important, Sarah. I feel it. I don’t know how, but it’s important.”

Sarah looked at this odd little girl, wearing a rather strange, old-fashioned party dress, her hair slightly mussed, her ribbon askew, a giant dog at her feet. The sky was blue, the tourists were passing by chatting about how
magical
the whole place was and snapping photos. The Renaissance palace was still standing where it had been since the 1600s. But the world had turned upside down more than once since then.

And yet Sarah was always skeptical about conspiracy theories. If there was a connection between Senator Charlotte Yates and Max’s cousin, so what? They both ran in jet-set circles.

“I think this Marchesa Elisa person might be working some angle,” Pols said. “Maybe she hasn’t given up trying to get the stuff back. What’s your impression of her?”

“Haven’t met her,” Sarah muttered.

“I keep having funny dreams,” Pols said. “Dreams with fire. I feel like something is about to happen.”

“Something is about to happen,” Sarah said, firmly. “You’re going to kick ass in this competition tomorrow and then I want Jose to take you to see a doctor for that cough. Where are your parents?”

“Excavating some temple in Nepal. Sarah. Can you trust Max or are you just in love with him?”

Sarah shot Pols a glance. Her face was unreadable. “What? Why do you say that?”

“It’s obvious.”

Sarah didn’t answer. She had been the only little girl in the neighborhood who
hadn’t
dreamed that one day her prince would come, and here was, well, a prince. It was absurd, and slightly embarrassing. But if someone shoved bamboo under her fingernails and made her tell the truth?

“Aren’t you excited that I saw Beethoven?” she asked, changing the subject.

“I see him every day,” Pols shrugged.

“You mean when you play his music, but I really saw him, or rather the trace of him.”

“Sarah, I may not see him with my eyes, but every time I pick up my violin or sit down at the piano and play Beethoven, he’s sitting there with me. I can feel him there. I guess I assumed everyone else did, too.” She was not bullshitting, Sarah could tell.

“You literally feel his energy? Like he’s there with you?”

“Sure. Mozart, too. All the composers, really. That’s what music is, it’s immortality.”

Sarah sat back and blinked. Once again she was reminded that Pols experienced the world in a completely different way than she did. Despite the fact that they grew up in the same city, only—what?—fifteen years apart—they may as well have been an African villager and a twenty-sixth-century astronaut for how similarly they saw the universe.

“Do you feel him here?” asked Sarah.

“There’s a lot to feel here,” sai
d Pols, raising her palms up. “I don’t know what’s Beethoven.”

Suddenly Sarah wanted to see Max very badly. She texted him again.
Where are you?

The next instant her phone rang. “Max?” she said.

There was an uncomfortable pause. “Sarah, it’s Miles. Can you be in my office in five minutes?”

It didn’t sound like a question.

“I have to go to the principal’s office,” Sarah told Pols, after she hung up. “I think I might be in trouble.”

“If they are trying to get rid of you,” Pols said, serenely. “Don’t let them. Hey, I’m hungry. Is the ice cream good in Prague?”