by Magnus Flyte
“Well,” Nicolas said, hefting the bubble-wrapped package under his arm. “Naturally I obey every command of Dr. Wolfmann’s. But first I must escort Ms. Weston to the palace and show her to her room.”
“Oh, but that’s the other thing,” the woman said, in a rush. “There was some kind of accident in Sarah’s room. Something was spilled or broken or cracked or possibly leaking. They’re cleaning out another room for her. Miles suggested I show Sarah around while they get everything ready.”
“An accident?”
“Something might have fallen. There was crashing.”
The little man gazed thoughtfully at the woman for a moment and then appeared to make a decision.
“Ms. Weston,” he said. “Y nd hreen aour bag will be quite safe in the trunk. Petr can be trusted and you will find it cumbersome, carrying it about.”
Sarah swung her duffel into the trunk but retained hold of her carry-on bag. Nothing was going to separate her and her Mac. The little man leapt nimbly into the air and managed to grasp the top of the open trunk, bringing it down shut.
“Sarah Weston,” he said, turning around, “I leave you in the care of Eleanor Roland, a compatriot of yours, as you may have noticed, and a fellow scholar. Possibly not as foolish as she appears, although, conversely, possibly much more so. I leave you now. Immediately. As directed.”
Eleanor Roland seemed not at all bothered by the little man’s words and, laughing merrily, held a hand out to Sarah, who shook it. Eleanor Roland had a powerful grip.
“You didn’t have any trouble with your flight?” she asked. “Considering what happened in Venice, security must have been terrible. They still haven’t found the little dog of that poor girl. What a world.”
“They took my toothpaste,” Sarah said, trying to get her bearings. Little dog?
“It’ll be nice to have another young person join us,” Eleanor said.
“Us?” Sarah mumbled, as she watched Nicolas navigate around a clump of Goth Japanese teenagers. One of the kids whipped out a phone and aimed it at Pertusato’s retreating back while his friends giggled.
“Us,” Eleanor repeated, laughing again. “The academics. We’re quite a little family. I’ll show you St. Vitus now. It’s still early enough that the worst of the crowds haven’t descended. You must start with St. Vitus. It’s marvelous. Now see, this second gate dates from 1614. Note the German Imperial Eagle on top with two heads. Baroque, of course.”
Sarah followed Eleanor into a second courtyard. It made sense that there would be a number of specialists gathered at Lobkowicz Palace. The collection was enormous, and varied.
“Are you a musicologist?” Sarah asked, feeling slightly anxious about meeting a lot of academics who might look down on her credentials. She hadn’t really counted on having to measure pedagogic dick length with a whole tribe.
“Oh no!” Eleanor laughed. “Miles contacted me three months ago. Apparently he had read my book on seventeenth-century women artists and suggested I come and have a look at some things here.”
“Oh cool,” Sarah said, her eye caught by what looked like a giant iron birdcage planted in the second courtyard. “I didn’t know there were seventeenth-century women artists, actually.”
“Well, it’s a very short book,” Eleanor sighed. “Which is why this is so exciting really. They’ve recovered a whole cache of portraits by one Princess Ernestine of Nassau-Siegen. Mother-in-law to the 3rd Prince Lobkowicz. An amateur painter, but a good one. And I’ve got first dibs on her, which is nice for me. But you’ve got the big kahuna, I hear. Beethoven. Now behind you there’s the Chapel of the Holy Rood. That’s really the box office now. Our fearless leader is looking into getting us free passes to all the things, but until that happens we must pay our crowns just like all the unwashed masses. That’s the New Royal Palace, not open to the public. This fountain dates from 1686. All of th s86.veredis was built over a buried moat, if you can believe it.”
“Who’s the fearless leader?” Sarah asked, lagging behind Eleanor so she could check out the birdcage next to the fountain. “Do you mean the . . . um, Nicolas Pertusato?”
“Miles Wolfmann,” the woman corrected. “Head of the Collection. Absolutely everything goes through him and he knows everything about . . . well, everything. He’s American, too. And a darling. You’ll love working with him.”
Sarah peered into the iron birdcage, which loomed over an octagonal opening in the ground.
“It’s a well,” Eleanor instructed. “Early eighteenth century. This cage thingy is by an unknown artist. Not terribly interesting. But just wait. This will take your breath away.” Sarah followed her guide across the courtyard and through an arch of the New Royal Palace. The giant Cathedral of St. Vitus loomed up before her.
“Yowsa,” Sarah said.
Eleanor prattled on about the history of the cathedral, which Sarah listened to with half an ear. Sarah knew almost nothing about architecture, but it was hard not to be impressed with the size of the thing.
“The images on either side of the central arch are of Charles IV and his wife, Elizabeth of Pomerania,” Eleanor was saying. “Apparently Elizabeth could bend a sword with her bare hands. Oh good. No line. We can just duck right in.”
They entered the cathedral. The interior was enormous and pleasantly cool, filled with early-morning light filtering through huge stained-glass windows running down either side of the nave. Religion might be a pretty dubious gift from our ancestors, Sarah thought, gazing upward, but it did come in some fairly kick-ass wrapping paper. It was hard to focus on one thing.
“I come here nearly every day,” Eleanor said. “It just never gets old. Spectacular, isn’t it? Romanesque, Gothic, neo-Gothic, Baroque, and some good old twentieth-century cash as well. The windows were sponsored by banks and insurance companies, of all things. Over here to the left is the window done by Mucha.”
Sarah followed Eleanor, suppressing a desire to shout and test the acoustics. She wasn’t sure what this guy Mucha was trying to depict in his window—her hagiography was a little muddled—but the blues and greens were pretty.
“How long have you been here?” Sarah murmured.
“A month,” Eleanor replied. “There are enough Ernestines to devote a whole room to them for exhibition. If we can raise the money to repair them. They’re in deplorable condition. I’ve rather fallen in love with all my ladies. Wait till you see them.”
“If you’ve been here a month then you must have known Professor Sherbatsky,” Sarah said.
“It was . . . very shocking.” Eleanor lowered her voice. “Terrible. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to know him very well. Miles spoke very highly of him. They were good friends, I believe. You were the professor’s student, weren’t you?”
Sarah nodded. Maybe this all-knowing Miles Wolfmann person could illuminate something about the supposed suicide of her beloved professor.
“Were you there when he . . .” Sarah hesitated.
“I was in Germany,” Eleanor said quickly. “A little field trip to the place of Ernestine’s death. It’s proving terribly difficult to find anything about her. When I came back from Mengerskirchen I learned . . . well, everyone was very upset.” Eleanor placed a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Were you close?”
Sarah hesitated. She had felt close to Sherbatsky, but their intimacy was musical. What did she really know about his personal life?
“He was a brilliant man,” Sarah said. “I’m still kind of in shock about it. So it was Nicolas Pertusato who found him?”
“Well, it was the prince who found him,” Eleanor frowned. “Prince Max. The current heir. But Nicolas was there, too. The prince . . . well.”
Sarah waited.
“Anyway,” Eleanor chirped. “Did I tell you why the cathedral is dedicated to St. Vitus? King Wenceslas was interested in converting the local population to Christianity. And apparently he had acquired the arm of St. Vitus on his travels—a relic, you know.”
&nb
sp; Sarah nodded, wondering how she could get her enthusiastic tour guide back into the twenty-first century.
“Now over on the other side is the Chapel of St. Wenceslas,” Eleanor chirped on. “It was built in 1345 and there are 1,345 jewels decorating it. On special days they display his skull!”
Sarah threaded her way through gaping tourists. The Chapel of the Good King was cordoned off and they had to wait their turn to peer in.
“Mmmm,” Eleanor said. “Marvelous.”
Sarah began to feel a little claustrophobic, which was odd considering the enormity of the place.
“Wenceslas was murdered by his brother, Boleslav the Cruel,” Eleanor said, brightly. “And over here through this door are the Crown Jewels. We can’t go in, naturally. They’re said to be very unlucky. A few days after the Nazis’ head honcho tried them on he was assassinated.”
“Coffee,” Sarah mumbled. She had only been in Prague for what felt like ten minutes and already her head was swimming with tales of dead people and murder. “I need some coffee.”
“Oh, but you’ll want to see the tomb of St. John of Nepomuk,” Eleanor insisted. “Wenceslas IV had him flung from the Charles Bridge. It’s all silver! And legend has it there’s a hell portal somewhere in the cathedral—”
Sarah reached out a hand and braced herself against the nearest pillar.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Eleanor cooed. “Did you fly British Airways? They stuff you with salty chips. You’re probably dehydrated.”
Sarah and Eleanor exited the cathedral. Sarah riffled through her bag to find her sunglasses, even though the morning was turning cloudy.
“There’s a nice little spot over in front of the Schwarzenberg Palace,” Eleanor said, leading Sarah back outside the castle gates. Sarah glanced up at the Sexy Stabber on the way out. He no longer seemed quite so sexy.
“Watch out!” Eleanor cried, grabbing Sarah by the arm as a glossy red vintage Alfa roadster driving way too fast swung by them, screeching to a halt next to the little man’s car. Sarah half-stumbled, the muscle in her calf sending out a warning twinge.
The driver of the Alfa flung open the door and whirled around toward the two women. Sarah had the confused impression of a tall, thin man dressed in an impeccable three-piece suit. A homburg shaded his face.
“Where’s Pertusato?” he shouted, so loudly that several pigeons flew up in alarm around him.
“At the palace,” Eleanor called back. “They only just arrived. Let me introduce—”
The man pounded angrily on the top of his car and then set off in a dead sprint through the gate without a backward glance.
“Who was that?” Sarah asked.
“That was Prince Max,” Eleanor said. “Maximilian Lobkowicz Anderson.”
“I thought Maximilian Lobkowicz died in the seventies or something,” Sarah mumbled, trying to remember what she and Bailey had gleaned of the recent family history on Google.
“That was the grandfather of this Max,” Eleanor replied. “He died without any male heirs, so it all passed to a daughter’s family, the Andersons.”
“Oh. He seems like kind of an asshole,” Sarah said.
“He’s a little strange,” Eleanor said, sighing. “I’d try to stay out of his way if I were you.”
EIGHT
Sarah had to hand it to the anonymous architects of this spired city—the place had a vibe. And vibe central was the Prague Castle complex, which would be her home for the summer. Even the espresso wasn’t totally keeping her brain activity centered on the logical left side. That old loony right side kept saying “for a thousand years, people have lived and died on this very spot.” But then she imagined that the right side of her brain was speaking in a pirate accent (“on this very spot—argh”), and she felt normal again. This place was just a pile of old stones. Pretty stones arranged in intriguing ways, but just old stones.
“And outdated wiring,” her father would have added.
Eleanor fluttered her way past the entrance to St. George’s and Golden Lane. “You can see those later,” she said. “You must be dying for a shower.” Sarah was desperate to brush her teeth, and to massage her aching calf muscle, which made her feel even more like a pirate, as she dragged it along like a wooden leg.
At last, as the cobbles began to descend toward the gate at the narrow end of the wedge-shaped castle complex, they came to Lobkowicz Palace. The façade was completely hidden behind scaffolding. Sarah could hardly hear Eleanor over the sounds of men wielding power tools above them. “Steam cleaning,” Eleanor shouted. “Poles.” Poles? Finally Sarah understood that Eleanor meant the workers themselves were Polish, and that the building had suffered years of neglect, now being remedied.
< vt>As they stepped around tarps and sheets of plastic and coils of tubing, Eleanor muttered to Sarah, “I don’t think there’s a licensed contractor in the whole city. Sometimes I wonder if this whole place isn’t going to come down on our heads. I suspect Prince Max wouldn’t even care. Secretly some of us are rooting for the cousin.”
“Cousin?”
“Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti. Head of the Italian branch, and my dear, you wouldn’t believe the style. There’s been quite the kerfuffle between Max and the Italian Lobkowcizes over who is the rightful heir, but Marchesa Elisa and Max are friends. She’s charming.”
They made their way through rooms where men were painting and plastering. The building hadn’t looked that big from the outside, but they seemed to walk and walk until finally they came to a door with a note stuck to it.
“Oh dear,” said Eleanor, reading the note. “It’s from Jana, the prince’s assistant.” She pronounced it “Yunna.” “They’ve moved you to the basement.”
In her fatigue, Sarah lost track of how many stairs she and Eleanor went down. The sound of the power tools faded away, for which Sarah was initially grateful. Eleanor pulled a tiny flashlight out of her purse as they turned down a dark corridor with a cheery, “It’s best to keep one of these with you at all times here.” Finally they came to a small door. Eleanor threw it open, and turned on a light.
The room had a sagging but comfy-looking small bed with a clean quilt on it. There was a side table with a lamp for reading and an old bureau for clothes. On the wall was a not bad engraving of a cow.
“The bathroom’s right down the hall,” Eleanor said. “And you don’t have to share. So lucky—those ceramics people are filthy.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever slept in a room without a window,” Sarah said.
Eleanor looked behind the door, as if a window were suddenly going to appear. “At least you won’t have to deal with the noise upstairs,” she said. “I’d be lost without my earplugs. Why is it art people all have septum issues? Dinner’s at eight. Pretty informal, long table, we alternate who’s cooking. Sometimes the power goes out. Well, anyway, welcome!”
Eleanor’s Moroccan heels clicked away into the distance until there was no sound. Sarah sat down on the bed. She was living underground. Like a mole. Like a bottle of wine. Like a corpse. Like nuclear waste. Sarah tried to tell herself that a window was not an essential part of a bedroom. Bedrooms were for sleeping. And with Prague’s history of defenestrations, she should be happy there were no windows for her to be thrown out of. She sighed, lay back, and fell instantly asleep.
• • •
When Sarah awoke, she felt a moment of panic. There was not one glimmer of light anywhere. She put her hand in front of her face and saw nothing. Was she dead? Buried alive? Remembering where she was, she groped for her phone: 3:17 p.m. She had only slept for a couple of hours, then. She felt unsettled, groggy, and hungry.
Sarah found her way through the maze of corridors and up several fl {up bsp;•
“There you are, Miles has been waiting for you,” said an accented voice. Sarah turned and was greeted by a short, plump Czech woman with bristly colorless hair. Her clothing, her expression, her manner all said, “Everything will run smoothly now that I am here.”
“You must be Jana,” said Sarah.
Jana had Sarah holding a steaming cup of coffee and a brioche in what felt like four seconds, and suddenly she was standing in the doorway of a crowded office filled with bubble-wrapped paintings, sculptures, enormous ledgers, photographic equipment, and a large Macintosh computer.
“Here’s Miss Weston,” announced Jana. “And Dr. Wolfmann, the prince wants to see you as soon as possible.” From her tone, Sarah could tell that Jana, at least, respected the prince. Sarah thought it was funny that people who had grown up under communism would still tingle at the thought of nobility.
“Were you able to nap in the bomb shelter?” said a handsome man in his late forties with an academic’s prematurely stooped shoulders and skinny calves. He wore a giant, round, illuminated magnifying lens on his head. “Isn’t it funny that only twenty years ago, they were down there cowering in terror that we trigger-happy, decadent, capitalist Americans would go nuclear on them any minute? Little did they know our secret weapon was Starbucks.” They shook hands and he seated Sarah opposite his desk, removing his magnifier and then fussing somewhat self-consciously with his hair.
Sarah’s eye was caught by a strange little bronze object on Miles’s desk. It had a figure that looked like a Greek goddess, and others that looked like jesters.
“It’s an automaton,” Miles said. “Turn the handle. Gently.”
Sarah did, and the crank made the jesters jump while the goddess spun around. “Cute,” she said.
“It’s worth about three hundred thousand dollars,” said Miles calmly. Sarah withdrew her hand.
“We found it in the Austrian Fine Art Database,” Miles said. “It was in a box in the basement of the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, where it had been since 1945, when the Allies found it in an SS officer’s home in Munich. I admit, when you’re looking for a missing Brueghel, a windup toy doesn’t seem all that exciting. But any collector in the world would kill for it.”
“How did you know to even look for it?”
