Seduced by the Operative

by Merline Lovelace

  The palace of the archbishop of Prague looked as though it, too, had sustained damage. Scaffolding almost obscured the entire front of the residence. The steel superstructures crawled up the elaborate rococo facade and encased the statues crowning the four-story building. Still frowning, Luis craned his neck. He spotted two plasterers repairing an arch over a window and what might have been a third worker moving among the statues.

  Nothing to account for this odd sensation, yet Luis couldn’t shake it. Nor could he ignore it. He’d lived on the edge too long to dismiss any signal, however subtle. He was still trying to pinpoint its source when he and Claire walked through the tunnel in the scaffolding that led to the palace’s front entrance. Once inside, the sheer magnificence of the reception hall drove everything else from his mind.

  “Madre de Dios!”

  Luis’s travels had led him to a number of the world’s great palaces. Versailles. Schönbrunn. Rambagh in Jaipur. The monumental Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. One sweeping glance told him the archbishop of Prague lived amid almost as much splendor as any tsar or maharajah ever had.

  There was marble everywhere—rich Carrera marble veined with gold. The furnishings in the reception hall had to have been bought or plundered centuries ago, while light poured over them through leaded windows two stories high.

  They were greeted just inside the entrance by a security guard who confirmed their appointment before handing them over to a uniformed guide.

  “Father Milosec is waiting for you. Please, come with me.”

  Their footsteps echoing on marble floors, they followed the guide through a series of public antechambers to a gallery lined with portraits of past bishops. That opened onto a second gallery containing sumptuous seventeenth-century tapestries that could only have been woven by Gobelin.

  The private residence of the archbishop of Prague occupied the rear wing of the building. The rooms were somewhat less cavernous but still magnificent. With a smile and a bow, the guide ushered them into a suite of offices.

  The cardinal’s executive assistant rose and came around from behind his desk to shake their hands. Tall and stoop-shouldered, Father Milosec wore the old-style black cassock Luis remembered from the padres of his youth.

  “I hope Cardinal Tuma is feeling better,” Claire said when they’d exchanged greetings.

  “He is,” the priest replied in heavily accented English. “Unfortunately, his eminence’s health is quite precarious these days. He’s looking forward to your visit, however. This way, if you please.”

  After the majesty of the rest of the palace, Luis half expected to be shown into a gilded throne room. Instead, Father Milosec opened the door to a book-lined library redolent with the scent of wax candles and old parchment.

  “The cardinal will offer his hand,” the priest murmured as they entered. “It is the tradition to kneel and kiss his ring, even if you are not of our faith.”

  Claire nodded, and the priest raised his voice.

  “Dr. Cantwell is here, Your Eminence, and Colonel Luis Esteban.”

  The tiny, silver-haired figure, huddled in a black cassock piped with red, looked up from the volume he’d been reading and murmured in Czech.

  “His eminence welcomes you both,” Milosec translated.

  The cardinal offered a liver-spotted hand adorned by a heavy gold ring. Claire went down on one knee to kiss it. Luis did the same before moving to one of the chairs the cardinal indicated with a nod of his head.

  With Father Milosec translating, Claire reiterated the urgency of her visit. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice. I very much appreciate it, as does our president. He’s deeply concerned over his daughter’s nightmares.”

  “Tell me of these dreams,” the cardinal said through his assistant.

  While Claire recounted the dreams’ macabre elements, Luis’s respect for her deepened. No one listening to this calm, collected professional would guess she’d suffered almost the same terrifying nightmare as her young client only hours ago.

  When she finished, the cardinal sighed.

  “Death, as represented by skeletal apparitions, plays often in the dreams of Slavs,” he confirmed through his interpreter. “We have a morbid fascination with it, perhaps because we’ve seen so much of war and plague and pestilence throughout our history. This is what I wrote so many years ago in my treatise.”

  “Did you find these apparitions to recur frequently in dreams of specific individuals?”

  “In many instances.”

  “What was the incident rate among young people?”

  “I don’t know that I ever calculated precise figures….” His forehead wrinkling, the cardinal searched his memory. “As I recall, the tendency was more common among children who had lost a parent to illness or war.”

  “Like Stacy Andrews,” Claire murmured.

  “You say the girl’s great-grandfather came from Bohemia?”

  “Yes, Your Eminence.”

  “Then such dreams may well run in her blood,” the elderly cleric said sadly.

  Father Milosec spoke up then. “Do you know the grandfather’s name?”

  The time Claire had spent going over her case notes this morning paid off. She answered without hesitation.

  “Teodore Cernak. According to President Andrews, Cernak was conscripted into the Nazi navy at the age of sixteen, deserted and stowed away on a cargo ship bound for the States. Since there’s no official record of his entry into the States, I haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly where he was born or emigrated from.”

  “Perhaps I might be of help with that.” A hint of pride crept into Father Milosec’s voice. “I recently led the effort to computerize all parish records within our archbishopric. Some go back as far as the Middle Ages.”

  After asking permission from the cardinal, he moved to a marble desk supported by four carved lions and picked up a sleek digital phone. The irony of twenty-first-century technology cloaked in the rich pageantry of bygone eras wasn’t lost on Luis.

  Claire and Cardinal Tuma conversed for another five or ten minutes, but the cardinal could offer no suggestions for banishing Stacy’s nightmares except prayer.

  “It is a most powerful tool.”

  “It is indeed, Your Eminence.”

  Masking her disappointment, Claire went down on one knee again to kiss his ring. Luis knelt as well. When they emerged from the library, they discovered Father Milosec’s pride in his computerization project was well justified. The lay clerk he’d called was waiting in the outer office with a printout. With a few hearty words of praise for the man’s efforts, the priest translated for his guests.

  “Teodore Cernak, son of Anya and Karel Cernak. Born 1923, in the parish of The Church of All Saints, Sedlec, Southern Bohemia. Ahhh, that may explain much!”

  Claire immediately pounced. “How so?”

  “Sedlec is a small town about an hour east of Prague. It is quite famous for its ossuary.”

  “Ossuary, as in a repository for human bones?”

  “Exactly. The present-day Church of All Saints was built on the site of an eleventh-century Cistercian monastery. The monastery’s abbott traveled to the Holy Land and brought back a bag of dirt, which he sprinkled on the graveyard. Word spread that this graveyard was a holy place, and people from all over came to be buried there. So many skeletons piled up over the centuries that they had to be moved to an ossuary to make room for others.”

  Skeletons again. Luis was beginning to hate the very thought of them. They’d seriously disrupted his world. Worse, they’d put terror into the heart of the woman he loved.

  That thought stopped him cold.

  Love was for poets. For hopeless romantics. For oversexed teenagers. What he felt for Claire…

  He looked at her and his chest squeezed. In that moment, he joined the ranks of poets. He loved this woman with all that was in him. The realization poured into every corner of his mind, so powerful that he had to st
ruggle to take in Father Milosec’s comments.

  “I strongly recommend you visit this place, Dr. Cantwell, and see it for yourself. There is perhaps no more vivid manifestation of the Slavic preoccupation with death, such as his eminence described in his treatise.”

  “We were planning to fly home after my interview with the cardinal, but…”

  Claire glanced at Luis. He could read in her face the desire to grasp at what might be their last straw.

  “You say this town is only an hour away?” he asked the priest.

  “Yes. I’ll write the directions for you.”

  Another uniformed guide escorted them back to the main entrance. Claire had no idea so many people comprised the cardinal’s staff, but they’d certainly impressed her with their efficiency.

  Now if only she could decipher the directions Father Milosec had written out. The towns and streets all had Czech names, some of them fifteen or twenty letters long.

  “Good thing our rental car comes equipped with a Never-Lost GPS system,” she muttered to Luis as they retraced their way along the catwalk that tunneled through the scaffolding. “I hope it’s programmed for the areas outside Prague. If not, it’ll take an hour to key in some of these names.” She fished inside her purse for her cell phone. “I’d better call Major Talbot and advise her of another delay.”

  “Mmm.”

  The noncommittal reply brought her head around. Luis’s gaze was trained upward at a sharp angle. Deep creases furrowed his forehead.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “That statue.”

  She craned her neck to study the large stone saint with an open book in one hand and a long staff in the other. He was only one of many lining the pediment above the palace.

  “What’s so interesting about that one?”

  “I thought I saw a shadow behind it. Before we went into the palace. It could have been one of the workers, but…”

  “Oh, dear God! It’s moving. Luis! The statue’s moving!”

  Claire barely got the words out before the larger-than-life marble saint tipped forward. He fell off the pediment, dropped a story and hit the scaffolding, where he broke into monster chunks that plunged through the steel bars.

  The bizarre incident happened in the blink of an eye. One moment, Claire was gaping at the tottering saint. The next, she put everything she had into a sideways lunge that knocked Luis off the catwalk and took her with him.

  Chapter 8

  The crash caused a furor.

  Tourists wandering through the palace courtyard screamed and covered their heads to protect themselves from flying debris. An elaborately uniformed guard came running from the next courtyard. The two plasterers working to restore the window arch high up in the scaffolding almost fell off their perch, craning to see what had happened.

  Luis didn’t wait for the cloud of white dust raised by the marble chunks to settle. Rolling to his feet, he dragged Claire up with him. “Are you hurt?”

  She glanced at the shattered fragments only a few feet away and shook her head. “No.”

  That’s all he waited to hear. Flinging himself at the metal framework, he went up it like a jungle beast after its prey. In her slim black skirt and pumps, Claire couldn’t follow. She raced back inside the palace instead.

  “The roof,” she shouted at the startled receptionist. “Where are the stairs to the roof?”

  “What has happened?”

  “A statue fell.”

  Or was pushed. Her jaw went tight and hard at the possibility.

  “How do I get to the roof?”

  The urgent demand brought the guard who’d escorted her and Luis from the cardinal’s chamber running back into the reception hall. He skidded to a stop and gaped at fine white dust coating Claire’s hair and skirt until her message got through to him.

  “The roof? Come, it is this way.”

  They ran down a wide hall to a storeroom tucked into a corner tower, then up five stories of narrow, winding stairs. Panting, Claire burst onto a small wooden platform that looked over a forest of chimneys and steeply pitched eaves covered with gray slate.

  A narrow walkway led to the pediment mounted above the palace’s front edifice. There was no rope or railing, only six inches of naked slate slanting downward at a sharp angle.

  When Claire kicked off her pumps, the guard issued an instant protest. “Madam! It is too dangerous!”

  She ignored him and took the steep path, running lightly on the balls of her feet. The pediment, with its frieze of marble saints, loomed directly below. Twenty yards. Ten. Five.

  She hit the bottom of the slope, breathing fast. The guard came down behind her much more slowly. There was just enough level space behind the statues for a more or less level pathway. Loose stones and bits of slate shredded the soles of Claire’s panty hose as she and the guard made their cautious way to the empty spot at the center of the frieze.

  They went carefully now, keeping a wary eye on several cracks in the marble pediment. They’d almost reached the center, when a scrabble of heels on stone spun Claire to the right. She ripped up the flap of her purse and was reaching for the Baretta nested inside, when she spotted Luis sliding down one of the steeply pitched eaves. His frustrated expression answered her question, but she asked it anyway.

  “Nothing?”

  He shook his head.

  Together, they inched closer to a spot where the fallen saint had once gazed out over the palaces of the castle. All along the edge of the frieze lay bits of broken slate and loose pebbles—too loose to imprint precise footprints, although scratches and scrapes in the slate suggested some foot traffic.

  Aside from those, they didn’t spot any evidence someone had lurked behind the statue, waiting to send it crashing down. No cigarette butts. No discarded gum wrappers or threads caught in cracks. No chance the police could dust there for fingerprints. Too many centuries of dirt and debris. With a last look at the gaping hole once filled by the marble saint, Claire, Luis and the guard made their way back up the narrow slate pathway.

  Some forty minutes later, Claire glanced around the crowded antechamber of the archbishop’s palace. So far, she and Luis had provided the details of their close call to the lieutenant of the elaborately uniformed palace guards; a very concerned Father Milosec and several members of his staff; two local police officers; a detective from what was described as the Bureau of Tourist Security; and—after Luis presented his credentials to the detective—a senior rep from the Czech Republic’s diplomatic service.

  In the process, the near-victims had been offered a cup of soothing peppermint tea, iced orangeade and/or a bracing glass of pilsner. Luis opted for the beer. Claire went with the tea. She took a sip from her second cup as the detective approached.

  “I had spoken with supervisor of work crew again,” he said in labored English.

  With a brusque gesture, he indicated the big, beefy craftsman who’d been summoned to account for his workmen on the scene. The man stood on the far side of the vast antechamber, flanked by two very nervous plasterers.

  “He says again, only two men on job today. They are working on windows when you walk out of palace.”

  “I’m sure there was a third,” Luis insisted.

  “But you can give no description?”

  “I told you. All I saw was a shadow of movement up on the pediment where the statues are mounted.”

  “You go up to roof,” the detective reminded him patiently, “as I did. We find only scuff marks. Could be made by anyone who has come to inspect damage from earthquake last year.”

  “So many of the palaces in the castle complex sustained damage in that near disaster,” Father Milosec put in, his face tight with concern above his black cassock. He was still visibly upset by his guests’ narrow escape. “This is why you see so much restoration work in progress. The pediment was next on the list for repair. I’m sick to think we left it until almost too late.” He made a heartfelt sign of the cross. “Thanks be
to God you were not hurt in this accident.”

  Claire shared a glance with Luis. He obviously believed it was no accident, and she trusted his instincts. Nor could she dismiss the fact that this incident came just days after the attack outside her condo.

  Coincidence? Not hardly, she thought, as Father Milosec drew a slender silver chain from the pocket of his cassock. At the end of the chain dangled an oval medal.

  “I had one of my staff take this to Cardinal Tuma. He has blessed it for you.”

  Claire peered at the figure depicted on the medal, recognizing the open book and staff. “Isn’t that the saint who crashed down on us?”

  “It is. He is St. Benedict, a most holy man and the founder of the Benedictine Order. We believe his medal protects the wearer from evil. I believe he drew your eyes heavenward this morning, just in time to save you from death or serious injury. Please, take this and wear it with the cardinal’s blessing.”

  “Thank you.”

  Claire had been raised Protestant, but she willingly bent her head so the priest could slip the chain over it. After the nightmare last night and missing death by inches this afternoon, she wouldn’t refuse any good-luck talisman.

  “I have one for you also, Colonel Esteban. Perhaps…Perhaps this shadow you saw was the brush of an angel’s wings, alerting you to the presence of danger.”

  Luis accepted the medal with a murmured word of thanks and an expression Claire couldn’t quite read. He held it in the palm of his hand while Father Milosec reclaimed her attention.

  “The Cistercian order we spoke of earlier—the one that founded the monastery at Sedlec—it is an offshoot of the Benedictines.”

  Claire blinked. Good grief! Another coincidence? If so, this mission was getting extremely weird.

  “Perhaps St. Benedict is adding his voice to mine,” the priest said quietly. “Perhaps he, too, is telling you that you must go to Sedlec to find the weapons to fight the demons you described to the cardinal.”

  “We intend to go,” she replied, glancing at her watch. “First thing tomorrow morning.”