by Magnus Flyte
Once again, they met by the front door. “Fifty-one,” said Cindy.
“Fifty-one,” said Sally.
There was a window missing. If they counted fifty-two windows on the outside of the house, then the house had fifty-two windows. But they could only find fifty-one windows when searching the rooms. That meant only one thing.
“There’s a secret room,” said Sally.
C [on ’indy looked at her sister and nodded. “We have to find it.”
The scene did not come from Sarah’s imagination. It was from a book, whose title she did not know, whose author’s name she could not remember. A book that her fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hill, was reading on the day when the school’s guidance counselor had come and interrupted the teacher’s afternoon story session. The counselor whispered to Miss Hill, who turned to Sarah.
“Sarah, would you go with Miss Cummins, please?”
Sarah had been surprised. She could sometimes be naughty, but her father had promised her that if she continued to excel in school and music, he would buy her a violin in the spring, and so she had been especially good all winter. This promise was, of course, a secret from her mother, who would have pointed out that their car had four bald tires that needed replacing. Sarah told her dad that the violin she rented through the school was fine, but he said he was proud of her talent and wanted her to have her own. Though a trace of snow still coated the frozen ground, crocuses were beginning to appear, and Sarah lay awake every night, thinking about how smooth and scratch-free a new instrument would be. Sarah wondered if maybe this was some kind of wonderful surprise that Miss Cummins was in on. Maybe she was about to present her with the violin!
Sarah skipped down the hallway alongside Miss Cummins, who closed the office door behind them and motioned to a chair. When Sarah looked up at her, she was suddenly surprised and uncomfortable to see Miss Cummins was crying.
Sarah looked at her, wondering what was the matter with her. She slid off her chair and went over to the counselor, putting a hand on her back. The woman took a breath and looked at Sarah.
“Your father had an accident on the highway,” Miss Cummins said. “I’m so sorry, Sarah. He’s dead. Your daddy is dead.”
Sarah never heard the end of the story about Sally and Cindy and the house with the missing window. And she could never be certain if the accident hadn’t been caused by the bald tires on her father’s car. Tires that might have been replaced if her daddy hadn’t been saving up to buy her a violin. In some strange way, these things had gotten tangled up in her mind, and Sarah spent a lot of time in the year after her father’s death trying to reconstruct the story of Cindy and Sally and the house with the secret room. But this one little scene was all she could remember. She wrote it over and over again, but it didn’t change anything. Her father was gone forever.
She couldn’t even ask her old teacher, Miss Hill, about the book, because after the funeral, her mother had needed time to get their lives together, and she had sent Sarah off to stay with her uncle Fred and aunt Margot. Sarah had lost touch with her classmates. Then she was selected to attend Boston Latin for high school, a long commute from the old neighborhood. By the time Sarah went back to ask about the book, Miss Hill had left the school. And no one knew which book she was talking about.
It wasn’t like Sarah hadn’t spent a lot of time in libraries. But it was hard to find a book when you didn’t know the author or the title, and it wasn’t a well-known favorite. She had asked every children’s librarian she had come across, with no luck.
Sarah didn’t keep a journal, didn’t scrapbook, or make photo albums. But she had hung on to The Page. [ Panio
• • •
Restless, Sarah prowled the apartment again but found nothing other than a bug on the ceiling of the kitchen. Well, she could at least kill the bug. It might feel good to smash something, let off a little steam. Sarah took off her shoes and, holding on to the hammer, stood on a kitchen chair, then on the table, then on top of her beloved and completely outdated seven-volume Lives of the Romantic Composers.
It was only then that she could see that her intended victim was not a bug. It was a symbol, written in a minute hand:
Sarah stared at the strange drawing. Someone had been here.
“Gesu cristo,” said Alessandro, coming through the apartment door and spotting Sarah perched on the heights of musical scholarship with a hammer in her hands.
“I think someone broke into the apartment,” said Sarah, climbing down. “But I don’t think they took anything.”
Alessandro made a quick check of his belongings, and returned to confirm that nothing was missing, not even his stash of pot.
“Why they no take our TV?” he said, insulted. “Is very nice TV.”
Sarah showed him the strange symbol, but Alessandro had no idea what it meant either.
“I think what we need is a nice grappa,” he suggested. “Tomorrow you sleep on plane.”
After
a grappa, Sarah still had no idea what the symbol meant, who would have put it there, or why. But after two grappas, she didn’t care at all.
FIVE
Of 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 min
d 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.
• • •
Eleven 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
There 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 . . .
<
br /> “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.
SEVEN
Sarah’s teeth felt mossy, her eyelids were gluey, and maybe it hadn’t been the greatest idea to tackle a child thief after being on a plane for eleven hours. She bent down to massage a cramp out of her calf muscle as a woman in her early fifties came rushing up to them.
“Mr. Pertusato,” the woman said, a little breathlessly. “I was sent out to greet you and our new arrival.”
“Then your timing is fortunate.”
“Miles wants to see you immediately,” the woman continued. “You’re supposed to leave the car and the luggage here and our valiant Petr will take care of it. Bring the package straight to him, Miles said. The word ‘immediately’ was stressed. Heavily.” The woman widened her eyes theatrically. Sarah had time during this speech to take in the woman’s appearance. A sky-blue Pashmina wrap over a paisley tunic. Overloaded charm bracelets. Silver hair in an unmistakably Midwestern feathered bob. Brocaded Indian slippers.
The kind of woman, Sarah decided in an instant, who uses the word “marvelous.” A lot.
