by Magnus Flyte
“The 1906 inventory. It’s been a godsend. If your family has any special collections, make sure they have an inventory done, and stored somewhere safe.”
Not really an issue for us, thought Sarah. Miles poured them both more coffee.
“What do you know about the family background?” he asked.
“Just the general Wikipedia stuff,” Sarah said, deciding brazen honesty was probably her best approach. “I know a bit more about Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz of course.”
“Oh yes, the 7th. We tend to call the princes by their numbers around here, saves time.” Miles continued on with more details of the Lobkowicz history. The palace had been in the family since {famidth="2ethe first Prince Lobkowicz married extremely well, to the rich widow and future defenestratee-shielder Polyxena Pernstein in 1603. While other noble families had died out or lost favor, the Lobkowiczes had always managed to both produce an heir and chart a safe course politically and financially, and thus for five hundred years had accumulated properties, books, paintings, ceramics, and all the other trappings of European nobility. By the early twentieth century, they were one of the richest families in Europe. The fairy tale began to unravel in 1938, when Hitler started making noises about annexing “German” lands in Czechoslovakia, and ended up swallowing the whole country. Maximilian Lobkowicz, who would have been the 11th prince except titles were abolished by then, barely escaped to England with his life. The Nazis seized everything and dispersed it, sending some pieces to be part of what was to be the Führer’s Museum in Linz, and handing out others to key SS members.
“Including this piece,” said Miles, pointing to the automaton. “Can you imagine Heydrich turning the crank as he planned the Holocaust?” Miles paused for effect.
“I can’t believe how recent World War II still feels here,” Sarah said. “It’s come up like three times since I arrived.”
Miles nodded. “It’s anything but ancient history here. Anyway, when the war ended in 1945, Maximilian returned and managed to get most of his belongings back. But in 1948, there was a communist coup and he was forced to flee again, leaving everything behind. Every single item that the Lobkowiczes owned became the property of the Czechoslovak government. And of course, ripe for plucking by higher-ups in the Communist Party all the way to Moscow. And that was the state of things when the current Prince Max, Max’s grandson, got the palace back last year after a legal marathon with the Czech government over restitution, and with warring branches of his own family.”
“Wow,” said Sarah. “What a crazy story. So I guess the current Prince Max would be the 13th, if they bring back titles. Do you call him the 13th, or is it like with elevators and you just skip that number and call him the 14th?”
Miles laughed. “It’s fine to just call him ‘Max,’ he said. But people have gotten into the habit of Prince Max, and I don’t think he really minds.”
“What was Prince Max doing before he got his family stuff back?”
Miles looked around as if the room might be bugged and leaned in close. “Officially, he was in banking. Really, he was the drummer in some sort of rock band in Los Angeles,” whispered Miles. “But no one knows that, and I didn’t tell you.”
Sarah smiled. She liked Miles Wolfmann, who was clearly an expert at what he did and was treating her as someone intelligent and capable. Her brain began to focus into something like its usual acuity and she was able to form some coherent questions about what she would be doing. Miles explained that most of the work on the music collection was complete, but there were gaps, loose ends, and a certain amount of disorganization. He hoped she wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
“Fortunately for us, the 10th prince had all of the family’s art, ceramics, weapons, books, and papers inventoried,” Miles explained. “So we work off that 1906 list, plus the Nazi records of what they took. The Nazis were bastards, but very meticulous bastards. When we find things listed in the inventory, like say, the automaton, that aren’t here in the palace or in one of the castle {of moss, then we begin searching the databases of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy. We try to determine if it disappeared during World War II, or after 1948, when the communists starting dispersing the collection. If it went to Moscow, it can be tricky, but we did have a sixteenth-century pillbox restituted from the Hermitage.”
“Wow,” said Sarah. “How did you learn to do this?”
“I have a masters in art crime,” said Miles. “After drugs and weapons, art crime is the third most lucrative illegal worldwide business.”
Miles showed her how to access the computerized inventory from 1906. The original hard copy was kept in his office. He also showed her the links to the art databases of the major countries and Interpol’s list of stolen artworks.
On one point, Labrador Miles became a pit bull: Every single item, as soon as it was acquired, he glowered at her, had to come to his office. No cleaning, no exploring, no examining. Just straight to Miles. No exceptions.
“I catalog everything,” he said. “I know it sounds harsh, but you understand. We’re talking thousands of objects. We have to assign them numbers and track them through the restoration and installation process. Some things are to stay here and go on display, others will go to one of the other family castles, like Roudnice or Nelahozeves, or Nela as it is known. We have a large staff and tons of workmen around. It’s kind of a nightmare, frankly, so sometimes I have to be harsh with people. We can’t have things disappearing after we’ve worked so hard to get them back.” His tone had become cold, and slightly aggrieved.
“I totally get it,” said Sarah soothingly. “Everything goes through you.”
Miles brightened again. “I don’t expect it will be a problem. Like I said, most of the music collection is complete, it just needs to be organized for display in a coherent fashion. Okay, so I’ll give you the tour and show you your workspace.”
He led Sarah up the stairs to the second floor.
“These were the public rooms, so they’re pretty spacious,” explained Miles. “They haven’t been renovated yet, so forgive the water stains and don’t expect working AC. Each room is dedicated to a different area of the collection. That way we try to stay out of each others’ way.” Something in his tone suggested that that was more of a goal than a reality.
The first room at the top of the stairs had a series of large canvases leaning against the walls, and long worktables set up with portable lights, brushes, and solvents. Some of the paintings were torn, and others had water and mold stains. Standing over one of these was a tall, very thin woman with magenta hair, wearing a pale blue lab coat.
“Sarah Weston, music, meet Daphne Kooster, family portraits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” said Miles. Daphne looked Sarah up and down and gave a provisional smile. “Did ve meet at Harvard?” asked Daphne in a thick Dutch accent, shaking Sarah’s hand firmly.
“Daphne’s from Amsterdam but did her masters at Harvard,” explained Miles.
“I’m at Thoreau,” said Sarah.
“Oh,” said Daphne. “I thought ve vere all connected vith Harvard or Yale in one vay or another. Thoreau?” She stru {?Minion ggled to pronounce the name.
“It’s a couple stops from Harvard on the T,” Sarah said, holding her ground.
“Sarah was a student of Professor Sherbatsky,” Miles said.
“Ohhhhh,” said Daphne. “I am sorry. I didn’t really know him.”
“Polyxena’s coming along beautifully,” said Miles, admiring Daphne’s work. Sarah, interested, looked now at the portrait. Polyxena Lobkowicz was a pale and intelligent-looking woman standing next to a badly painted green velvet chair in which a small white dog lay curled.
“You see de white gown she wears, richly embroidered, showing de family’s wealth and influence,” said Daphne authoritatively. “De red rose in her hair symbolizes her Spanish ancestry. De prayer book in her left hand to display de Catholic allegiance.”
“What does the dog symbolize?” Sarah asked. Da
phne blinked at her for a moment.
“De dog is just a dog,” she said, finally.
“You’ve done an exquisite job with this,” Miles said, crisply.
“You think so? I am gratified to hear you say it,” Daphne replied with great formality. They did not look at each other.
Okay, Sarah thought. Clearly Miles and Daphne were sleeping together.
Sarah turned to another painting, a smaller one featuring a somewhat mischievous-looking man with a funky plumed hat.
“Rudolf II,” Miles said. “The Holy Roman Emperor who moved the Imperial Court from Vienna to Prague and ennobled the 1st Prince Lobkowicz.”
“I hope you play soccer,” said Daphne. “I’m trying to organize a regular game for de staff, but mostly they are a bunch of bookvorms.”
• • •
Sarah did not get a really good look at the Ceramics Room or the smaller intermediate room filled with packing crates and large signs saying “Do Not Touch” in about eight languages.
“This will be Weapons when the collection arrives tomorrow from Roudnice,” said Miles as they entered a room with astonishingly ugly flowered wallpaper. The parquet floor was slightly buckled with water damage. Miles kept walking.
“And this is the Balcony Room.”
“Because there’s no balcony?” Sarah asked, looking around.
“There was,” said Miles. “Before a nineteenth-century renovation.”
Sarah went to the window and tried to look out, but the glass was covered with plaster dust that had been speckled by rain, making it difficult to see through. She threw the window open and leaned out, taking in the panorama of the city. For a moment, the power tools stopped and there were birds singing, and a light breeze whiffled the leaves of the trees beneath them.
Miles appeared next to her.
“Quiz me,” she said {,"-1" face, pointing to landmarks she recognized from the guidebook she’d read on the plane. “Vltava River, Charles Bridge, Malá Strana . . . and where’s—” Sarah suddenly had the sensation she was leaning too far out. Her stomach fluttered and her heart raced. Vertigo? She had spent her whole life climbing trees, skateboarding off handrails, sitting on the roof to watch fireworks with her dad. The blood began to drain from her head as if she were going to faint . . .
“Careful,” said Miles, grabbing her arm and pulling her back, closing the window. Heart pounding, Sarah looked through the dirty window four stories down to where a cement staircase made its zigzagging way down the steep hillside i
n front of the palace.
“This is the window that Professor Sherbatsky fell from?” Sarah framed it as a question, but it wasn’t really. Somehow she knew it was the place.
Miles nodded.
NINE
“Eleanor told me it was Prince Max who found him?” Sarah asked, forcing herself to deal with the wave of nausea passing over her and to think logically. It just didn’t seem a likely place to commit suicide. The height wasn’t particularly great, and if you were going to throw yourself out a window in a torrent of despair, would you really choose an inconvenient and awkward exit onto a flight of concrete steps? Granted your last view would be pretty, but they were in the Prague Castle complex. There were at least a dozen really fabulous places to off yourself within easy walking distance.
“Well, yes,” Miles said, frowning. “Yes, it was Max. And Nicolas Pertusato, whom you’ve met.”
“How did the police conclude it was suicide?” Sarah asked, a little more sharply than she intended. “I’m sorry, but it just seems so unlikely.”
“Max has had video cameras installed outside the building,” Miles said, pointing out the window. “He doesn’t trust the construction workers. Or anyone, really. Sadly, one of the cameras had footage of . . . apparently it was very deliberate.”
Sarah shook her head in disbelief.
“And Douglas Sexton—he’s working on the collection of Carl Robert Croll paintings—had a conversation with Absalom earlier that evening,” Miles explained. “Douglas had gone to Sherbatsky’s room to borrow some antihistamines and Sherbatsky had given him the whole bottle saying that he no longer needed them. He told Douglas, The way across has been revealed to me, and I intend to cross over tonight.”
“That doesn’t even sound like him.” Sarah frowned. “Sherbatsky was fusing traditional musicology with brain science. He definitely did not talk like Professor Dumbledore.”
Miles smiled sadly.
“I met Sherbatsky about ten years ago,” he said softly. “In Vienna. I liked the man, enormously. I can’t help feeling responsible.”
Sarah glanced quickly at Miles, who seemed unable to tear his eyes away from the window.
“I asked him to come,” Miles sighed. “I admit I ~,"- away fknew that with his name behind it we could draw a lot of attention to the Beethoven collection, but I also wanted his company. I should have known something was wrong. He was very preoccupied. And there were complaints. I put it down to Sherbatsky’s eccentricities but I feared he was making . . . enemies. In the group.”
A door across the room clicked open and Miles’s troubled and pensive gaze was instantly smoothed out as he smiled over Sarah’s left shoulder. His hand moved from Sarah’s elbow to the small of her back as he led her away from the window. “Ah, good. Here are two more of our family. Sarah Weston, meet Bernard Plummer and Miss Shuziko Oshiro.”
They made an almost comically contrasting couple. Bernard Plummer was well over six feet and massively built. He sported a luxurious mustache and was clad—there was really no other word for it—in a kind of medieval cape. Shuziko Oshiro barely came up to his shoulder despite at least five inches worth of spiky heels. She was impeccably dressed in a gold suit with a green-and-gold-flowered scarf wrapped around her throat.
“They are Rococo and Weapons,” Miles added. “And Miss Weston is Beethoven, of course.”
Bernard Plummer barely glanced at Sarah before launching into a complicated story about a wrangle with certain imbecile customs officials. He waved enormous hands that looked more than capable of handling pikes, staves, and battering rams. Miles at once became extremely businesslike and whipped out a cell phone.
“Sarah,” he said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to pick up our tour later. And I need to bring you up to speed on what you’ll be working with. Let’s meet tomorrow morning. Get some rest today.” Miles, with Bernard at his heels, left the room as Sarah turned to the delicate Japanese woman.
“So, Rococo?” Sarah said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say and her mind was still sorting through the conversation with Miles.
“Ah, shit, no,” the Japanese woman said, in a thick and unmistakable Texas drawl. “Rococo is Bernie. And don’t get him started, girl, because once you do I swear to Gawd it’ll be hours of descriptions of funny-lookin’ snuff boxes. I’m Weapons, honey. Guns, baby. Guns.”
• • •
An hour later Shuziko—“call me Suzi”—and Sarah were in the cramped kitchen of Lobkowicz Palace sipping beers from the Lobkowicz family’s brewery. Here, as elsewhere in the palace, construction was in full swing, and Sarah sat on a stepladder while Suzi chopped vegetables. Sarah offered to help, but it was clear that Suzi had extremely precise ideas about slicing and dicing.
After Miles and Bernard had left them, Suzi led Sarah through a whirlwind tour of the rest of the rooms, moving at top speed despite her five-inch heels, and chattering a mile a minute.
Then they had gone to Suzi’s room so Suzi could change, although first Suzi asked Sarah to take her picture—smiling primly by a window—so Suzi could send it to her mother in Dallas. “She likes to see me looking all ladylike,” Suzi explained. “I had a meeting with the Minister of Culture, so I hauled out the old war paint. My mom’s a real typical Texan. I think she’s still hopin’ I’ll go back to pageants ando pd a mee twirling.”
“Twirling?” Sarah laughed, as Suzi stripped down to a g-string, pulling out a pair of karate pa
nts and a Pokémon T-shirt and tossing them on the bed.
“Rifles! That’s where it all started for me. I was seven, eight years old and twirling these old guns: the Winchester Model 1866, British Enfield 1853, the Sharps Rifle. People freaked out, watching this little Japanese kid hurling these big ole rifles around. Man, I loved those guns. I won every pageant I entered. They probably thought I would shoot ’em down if they didn’t give me the tiara.”
Now, as Suzi chopped, Sarah sipped her beer and tried steering the conversation away from firearms toward the other academics at the palace. Unfortunately, Suzi had spent most of her time at Roudnice, the massive family ancestral home fifty kilometers north of Prague where the weapons were stored. Suzi did, however, have a little bit of gossip to share about (Prince) Max.
“I had a girlfriend who knew him at Yale,” Suzi said, picking up a meat cleaver, tossing it up in the air, catching it neatly by the handle, and bringing it down with a swift thunk on the chicken she was dismembering. “He was in her Dostoevsky seminar. She thought he was a freaky loner type, you know, the kind who’s memorized Crime and Punishment? I’d stay away from him if I were you.”
“Not my type,” said Sarah.
“Oh yeah?” Suzi asked, leering at Sarah and flipping her cleaver again. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Not my type of guy,” Sarah amended firmly.
“C’est la fuckin’ vie,” Suzi sighed. “It’s gonna be a long hot summer.”
Sarah was glad they had gotten that cleared up. She liked that the team here at the palace was clearly a little unusual. Suzi was a force to be reckoned with. The girl had dismantled four chickens in about three minutes.
“Anyway,” Suzi chattered on. “You’re gonna be up to your pretty eyes in Beethoven, right? Too bad about the other guy. He was some kind of a drug addict, I heard.”
“What?” Sarah almost did a spit-take with her lager. “Professor Sherbatsky a drug addict? No way.”
