City of Dark Magic (5 page)

FIVE

O
f course they performed a particularly thorough search of her carry-on bag at Logan Airport. Sarah, nursing a serious hangover, stood patiently in her socks and watched the mustachioed officer calmly laying out her stuff on the metal folding table: laptop, camera, iPod, chargers, toiletries, an electrical converter, her favorite Micron pens, a couple of notebooks. Condoms.

Sarah put on her sunglasses.

The guard confiscated her toothpaste.

Sarah stopped at a newsstand to buy a new tube. Digging into her backpack for her wallet, her fingers closed around a strange object. Sarah pulled it out. It was the small copper box the little man had left on her doorstep. She must have thrown it into her bag before she had gone over to Pollina’s house and forgotten about it. Well, at least it hadn’t set off any security alarms. That would have been awkward, since she didn’t even know what was in it. God, what if it were drugs? Her summer would have ended before it began.

Cautiously, Sarah opened the small box. Inside was a half-moon sliver of something gray. It looked like . . . a toenail clipping.

“Seriously?” Sarah laughed. She had half a mind to throw i ^ Paniontt in the nearest trash can, but she kind of liked the box. Sarah shoved it deep into her backpack.

Unexpectedly, her ticket put her in first class. Sarah had never flown first class. She hadn’t done much traveling in general. Instead of watching the in-flight movies, she picked up the guidebook to
Berlin, Prague, and Budapest that
she had grabbed at the airport bookstore. She realized with dismay that the college-student authors had grouped the three cities in a single volume for tourists most interested in their shared culture of beer. There were many suggestions as to how to speak to the police when you were arrested for public drunkenness, but little on local history. At last she found a small section on Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle, with two glossy photographs: one of the exterior, and one of a grand Imperial Hall inside the palace. The building had been known by its present name since the marriage of Polyxena Pernstein to Zdenek, 1st Prince Lobkowicz (1568–1628). And thus the dynasty began, she thought. Hard to believe the family was still around and kicking long after families like the Plantagenets and the Romanovs had disappeared from the society pages.

Sarah kept reading and learned that in 1618, in what was known as a “defenestration,” Protestant rebels had thrown Catholic Imperial ministers from the windows of Prague Castle, but the ministers had survived the fall, and taken refuge in the adjoining Lobkowicz Palace, where Polyxena had hidden them under her skirts. Those must have been some seriously big skirts, Sarah thought. She flipped to the maps in the back. Prague Castle seemed to incorporate a number of buildings, including several overpriced snack bars that served Pilsner and (the writers deigned to mention) a cathedral.

Sarah shut her eyes and reclined her seat back as far as it would go, letting her mind drift.

Beethoven had lived and worked almost entirely in Vienna, but he had made three trips to Prague. The first in 1796, when, like Mozart before him, Beethoven had gone to do the eighteenth-century version of networking. According to a letter to his younger brother Johann, Beethoven was received well and enjoyed himself. Even got a little composing in, minor works mostly, like the concert aria dedicated to the Countess Josephine De Clary, a typical Beethoven romance: brief, inappropriate, probably tortured, almost certainly unconsummated. During the second trip, in 1798, Ludwig premiered his Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, playing the piece himself. At the time, Beethoven’s prodigious gifts as a pianist were more remarked upon than his compositions. The last visit was in July of 1812, and believed to be the one where Beethoven met his Immortal Beloved, Antonie Brentano, before going to a spa in Teplitz. (The waters there were good for his gas.)
Be calm—love me—today—yesterday—what tearful longings for you—you—you—my life—my all—farewell.

Sarah sighed. She knew the contents of the letter nearly verbatim, of course, but only because she was a quick study, and it was endlessly quoted. Ludwig’s enormous, awe-inspiring genius, his productivity, his prescient modernism were all contained in music. Beside that, the letters to the Immortal Beloved looked no more impressive to her than bathroom stall graffiti:
L.V.B. luvs his I.B. Wishes she wuz here
.

Sarah began playing through in her mind the rondo from the
Waldstein
Sonata. Her left hand raced up and down her thigh in fast scales, her right hand trilling. Second theme. Triplets. Then a daring swing into A minor, then back to C major. There was nothing like Beethoven’s middle period for steeling the nerves. Sarah played h cara A appily. Shortly before the last pianissimo section, she fell asleep, although her hands played on into the coda, triumphantly.

•   •   •

E
leven hours later, Sarah threaded her way through Prague’s Ruzyne Airport. Emerging from passport control into the arrivals lobby, she was surprised to see her own name neatly printed in block letters on a small white sign. Sarah smiled weakly at the man holding it. He must have had the chauffeur’s uniform custom made for him. Sarah slung her bag over her shoulder.

We meet again,” said the little man gaily, his deep bassoon voice cutting through the mixture of languages all around them. “Welcome to Prague, my dear.”

SIX

T
here had been an awkward moment with the luggage. Sarah hadn’t wanted to hand her enormous duffel over to the little man, fearing it would topple him, and in her haste to fling the bag inside the trunk had almost crushed another—a flat object about the size of a laptop, encased in bubble wrap.

“Careful,” the little man had said, snatching it up. “This is actually rather valuable and I went all the way to Venice for it. And it is still not easy to get in and out of Venice after the tragedy.”

Sarah nodded, although if it weren’t for Alessandro, she probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to the gas leak or whatever it was that had killed those people in Italy.

“So sad,” the little man said. “Although Venice would be a lovely place to die.” He sounded almost wistful.

Sarah settled into the backseat of the Citroën, feeling a wave of fatigue wash over her. Her eyes stayed open, taking in red ceramic roofs, tidy backyard gardens, tiny cars, but her mind went to sleep. Sarah thought vaguely that the outskirts of Prague looked grim and unpromising. Every balcony of every apartment had a satellite dish on it.

Suddenly through her foggy head a question surfaced.

“Why did you give me a box with a toenail in it?” Sarah asked, leaning forward. She was slightly alarmed to notice that as he drove, the little man was also reading a Czech newspaper. He changed lanes so fast it made Sarah’s head hit the window next to her with a gentle thunk.

“I thought you might like it,” the little man said. “It was in Professor Sherbatsky’s pocket when we found him. If it had stayed there, then now it would be in some cardboard evidence box at police headquarters never to be seen again. I took the liberty of . . . liberating it.”

“But what is it?”

He shrugged. “It must have been important to him, if he intended to take it with him to the Great Beyond.”

“Why are you so sure,” asked Sarah, “that it was a suicide? I knew him. It doesn’t seem like something he’d do.”

“You knew him, but you don’t know Prague,” said the little man.
< fara Asp;.&nbs/p>

“Okay, so why’d you break into my apartment and go through my stuff?” she asked, in her best South Boston tough-girl voice. Of course she wasn’t sure it
had
been him, but she didn’t like the feeling that the little man was sort of messing with her. Best to go on offense. “Why’d you draw a symbol on my ceiling? What’s that about?”

“I’m flattered,” said the little man, as the car emerged from a tunnel and a fairy-tale city appeared in front of Sarah, “that you think I could reach your ceiling.”

Sarah couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. The little man joined her.

Sarah settled back in her seat and took in the pastel buildings, pointed terra-cotta roofs, narrow cobbled streets. According to the brief historical notes in her ridiculous guidebook
,
this was the city where people had labored to turn lead into gold, where Rabbi Loew had turned a handful of dirt into a golem, where anything was possible. Prague.
Praha
. The name actually
meant
“threshold.” Pollina had said the city was a portal between the life of the good and . . . the other.
A city of dark magic,
Alessandro had called it.

They passed a kitschy ice-cream store with the words “Cream & Dream” curlicued across the front. A family posed by the doorway, all carrying tall cones and holding up their thumbs while someone took their picture.

I need coffee,
she thought, closing her eyes.

After what was either five minutes or an hour, the car bumped to a stop. “We have to walk from here,” said the little man. He hopped out of the car and moved to the trunk, gently lifting out the bubble-wrapped package and then swinging her huge duffel out like it was filled with feathers. Sarah looked across the street at a gilt arch over stone pillars. The pillars were topped with shocking images of sheer brutality: On one, a giant man raised a club like a huge baseball bat, about to swing at the head of a screaming, crying victim lying on his back, defenseless. On the other, a massive caped soldier with washboard abs prepared to stab a person curled up in the fetal position.

“Welcome to Prague Castle,” the little man said, smiling.

Looking at the statue’s naked, muscled torso and the bulging biceps on his upturned arm, Sarah felt a surprising surge of sexual interest. Apparently jet lag was not a deterrent to libido, nor was cold hard stone. She thought about the Supreme Court justice who said art was art and porn was porn and he knew the difference when he saw it. She was not so sure.

Sarah widened her gaze to take in the two striped guard boxes, à la Buckingham Palace, in front of which uniformed men posed with rifles.

“We are all the way at the back,” explained the little man. “This building here belongs to our neighbor, the president.”

A tour group of Germans in sandals and socks passed in front of them, following a guide holding an umbrella topped with a stuffed dragon.

Sarah noticed an incongruously dark-haired kid of about twelve lingering on the edges of the group. She watched as the boy sidled up to an upward-gazing tourist, saw the kid’s thin hand reach into a gaping shoulder bag. Sarah had grown up in a neighborhood where this kind of thing was routine, but it still pissed her off. Sh kd hreach intoe wasn’t about to let a snot-nosed Prague townie ruin some poor slob of a tourist’s day. In two seconds she tackled the thief, grabbed the wallet, and handed it back to the startled woman as the kid fled.

“Danke schön,”
the woman said. The entire crowd of Germans applauded.

Sarah returned to the little man, who had a strange, not entirely approving expression on his face. Sarah, usually quick to size people up, was having trouble with . . .

“I just realized,” Sarah said, picking up her duffel bag. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Nicolas Pertusato,” he said, with a quick, shy smile. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Nicolas waved his arm to indicate the square past the gates of the Mad Batter and Sexy Stabber. “And this is called the Courtyard of Honor.”

“More like the Courtyard of
Dishonor,” Sarah said, brushing gravel off her jeans.

“That depends on your point of view,” said Nicolas Pertusato, calmly.