by Magnus Flyte
But Charlotte’s admiration of Paisley—like her collection of precious objects—was something she kept very, very private. Of course, they had never been able to prove that Paisley was a spy for the KGB or link him to Kennedy’s assassination. But Paisley had ended up in Chesapeake Bay with a bullet in his temple and a thoroughly discredited reputation. And Charlotte Yates ended up . . . well, she wasn’t done yet. There was an office with a pleasing oval shape on the horizon.
Anyway, she didn’t consider Sarah Weston to be a possible agent for the home team, but it was always possible the girl was a plant from one of her enemies.
Unlikely. But there had been a few odd things happening at the palace.
• • •
Charlotte tossed the mangled straw into her wastepaper basket and selected another straw from the beautiful cigarette case.
The case had once been the property of the 9th Prince Lobkowicz. She had found it under her pit e billow one night in Prague with a message tucked inside: The right to own beautiful things should be reserved for the beautiful.
A lovely present from Yuri, the first of many. Charlotte smiled. Poor silly little faux Prince Lobkowicz thought he could put his grubby little mitts all over whatever he wanted, but he’d never track this one down.
Oh, dealing with the situation at the palace would be so much easier if the cousin were in charge. Although if Venice proved anything, it was that Marchesa Elisa might possibly have a screw or two loose. This, too, was worrying.
Charlotte had met Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti at a Heritage Foundation event, years ago. The party had been a sea of beaded jackets and unflattering hairstyles, from which the young Marchesa Elisa, in a ravishing Givenchy sheath and impeccable French twist, had emerged like a finely honed stiletto. Charlotte had turned to an aide to inquire who the glamorous woman might be, and was somewhat startled to hear the name “Lobkowicz.”
After the Velvet Revolution, Charlotte had kept a close eye on events unfolding in Prague. She wasn’t worried that anything connected to her days there with the CIA would emerge, the Agency knew how to keep its secrets. But there had been other . . . involvements that the Agency didn’t know about. Memories in that part of the world were long, and then there was the matter of some personal letters, which Charlotte knew to be concealed somewhere in Lobkowicz Palace. Someone would have to know a very great deal to be able to trace those letters directly back to her, but Charlotte didn’t like the idea of them being out there, beyond her control. A too-thorough examination of the Lobkowicz goodie bag was another concern. So far the red tape had been reassuringly thick and tangled, but Charlotte knew it was important to stay several chess moves ahead. She had turned to an aide.
“What is she doing here?” Charlotte demanded. “Who is she with? What are her affiliations?”
“I’m not sure,” the aide bleated. “I’ll find out of course. Apparently she’s seated at your table for dinner.”
By the time dessert was served, the marchesa had confided to Charlotte in charmingly Italian-accented English her perturbation at being shut out of the Lobkowicz holdings.
“The heirs,” sniffed the marchesa, “are American. ‘A nation of lawyers and plumbers,’ my father used to say. The collection means nothing to them, they have no sense of history, of our family’s position, nothing. If the restitution process goes through, these Americans could get it all back and then put everything away in banks and vaults where no one can enjoy them! Or make a museum for ‘the people.’ My mother always taught me that the best way to keep jewels beautiful was to wear them next to your skin. What good is something that you can only look at?”
Charlotte had nodded sympathetically. Later, on a secluded balcony, she had offered the marchesa a cigarette from her sapphire-encrusted case. It had amused Charlotte—a poor orphan from Virginia—to offer a European aristocrat a smoke from a cigarette case that had once belonged to that same European aristocrat’s family. The marchesa was dying to get her hands on her family’s possessions, and here Charlotte was waving one of those items in front of her. Not that the marchesa would recognize it of course. The world was full of cigarette cases.
“Beautiful,” the marches marcha had said, her eyes glinting.
“Picked it up at a little antiques market in Prague,” Charlotte had replied, with an even smile.
“Ah, you know Prague?”
“I take an interest,” Charlotte had said. “Did you know I am on the board of the American-Czech Cultural Alliance?”
“Oh yes?” The marchesa exhaled smoke through her aquiline nose. “Then of course you might support the treasures of my family being shut away in a museum.”
A photographer wandered out onto the balcony and held up his camera. The two women stopped talking and posed. The photographer moved on.
“Perhaps not every treasure,” Charlotte had said, tucking the cigarette case away. “But these things move slowly, and a restitution process will be a very complicated affair. I assume the board would support some kind of museum. If so, I plan on being very involved with the administration of this. Your advice could be quite . . . valuable.”
“And if there is anything I can ever assist you with, I am more than happy,” Marchesa Elisa replied. “Perhaps at some point we may . . . cooperate.”
And that had been that, for a while. The various wheels in Prague had churned slowly, and quietly. Charlotte knew the marchesa was doing battle with the American heirs over the property, but she bided her time, waiting.
Recently things had accelerated. The current heir, one Max Anderson, was proving to be irritatingly clever with the red tape despite his youth and inexperience. The Nazis had been one thing. The communists another. But now there were academics crawling all over the palace. Of course, now Charlotte was quite a powerful person in Washington, but if her reach was longer, it was that much more exposed flesh. As the first woman to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the newshawks were always watching, hoping to catch her in a crying jag, or see a tampon fall out of her purse. Always better to let others do the reaching. Safer to be the one directing the puppet. The time to cooperate with the marchesa had come.
Elisa had access to the palace, and while Miles assured Charlotte constantly that he had his eyes on everything, that meant it was important to have eyes on Miles. Charlotte had told Miles to look for love letters from a woman to man. An American woman to a Russian man. In the 1970s. Harmless love letters. Of no historical interest whatsoever. A personal one to her only.
She wanted them back. She needed them back. Charlotte brought the cigarette case to her lips.
The right to own beautiful things should be reserved for the beautiful.
Oh, she had loved Yuri so. And he had loved her, too. Really, it had all been done for love. She had been young, and, yes, a little foolish.
Charlotte cast another quick eye over Miles’s report. Nicolas Pertusato was back at the palace. And apparently he’d been lurking in Venice at the time of the disaster. That little freak show remained the only person she couldn’t get a decent background report on.
Miles needed to get things under control or she was going to have to step in. Well, she would think about it on the flight to Venice. It was tiice>
But listen to the truth:
We will be judged by what we seem to be,
No one is ever tried for what they are.
My right to rule this kingdom is in doubt,
So must my part in her destruction be.
A fog best hides these good and evil acts,
The worst mistake is that which comes to light.
One cannot lose if one does not concede.
Queen Elizabeth speaking to Mo
rtimer in Schiller’s Mary Stuart. Elizabeth I knew her stuff. And she knew how to run a secret police. But she was too emotional, getting all bothered by Mary Stuart. Charlotte had no personal beef with anyone. Not anymore. Not even with that nincompoop over in the Oval. He simply didn’t matter. It wasn’t, Charlotte
assured herself, personal. She wasn’t a vengeful person, really. No, not at all.
TWELVE
Sarah put on her headphones and hit “Shuffle” on her iPod. She needed a little break, so she was taking a quick jog around the castle grounds, dodging tourists and trying to work the tension out of her shoulders. Her assigned workroom in the palace—next to Arms and Armory, and down the hall from Decorative Arts—was a bit stuffy, since it had no window. Why did they always give her the windowless rooms? Were they afraid she would jump, too? Or be pushed?
She was accompanied on her run by Moritz, Max’s wolfhound, who had taken a liking to her ever since that first night.
It had been two weeks since what Sarah thought of as The Very Bad Evening. Yes, the sex in the bathroom was mind-blowing, but no one had come forward to claim ownership, so to speak. And as if that wasn’t annoying enough, she had no idea who had thought it hilarious to leave the precious fucking eleventh-century cross on her bed. Was it a joke? A message? A warning? Or just an attempt to rattle her? At the very least, it was embarrassing to be singled out that way.
To Sarah’s mind, further proof that Sherbatsky had not committed suicide was on his worktable. Contrary to what Miles had said, it wasn’t “mostly completed,” it was a mess. And the Sherbatsky that Sarah knew would never have left things half-finished and unexplained. There were copious notes about “Luigi”—Sherbatsky used the nickname for Beethoven that Beethoven himself had preferred—many of them difficult to decipher. Did the note next to “April 4, 1811, letter from Luigi to Prince L” say “Venice” or “Vienna”? Annoying. There were many notes about things to be looked up in the library at Nelahozeves, the Lobkowicz country place on the Vltava River. It was oice>
Sarah felt like taking a longer run, but her iPod was now playing Beethoven’s Piano Trio in C Minor, op. 1. It was as if LVB were whistling her back to work.
The Piano Trio in C Minor. Early Beethoven, in which you could hear the heights of Classicism, hints of Haydn, a glimmering foreshadow of the Fifth Symphony, and Luigi’s own stubborn don’t-tell-me-how-it’s-supposed-to-be inclusion of an unusual four-movement format, instead of the traditional three. Even what seemed simple and obvious about Beethoven always turned out to be complicated.
Like even his birth date. LVB was born in Bonn in 1770, but for some reason he continually denied that birth date all his life, even when copies of his birth certificate were shoved under his nose, insisting that he was born two years later. His father was undoubtedly Johann van Beethoven, but Luigi did little to contradict rumors that he was the unacknowledged son of Frederick the Great. Probably because he hated his father—an alcoholic and only middling musician—so much. Daddy Beethoven had wanted his son to be a child prodigy, another boy Mozart, and drove him relentlessly at the clavier and violin, which should have driven the music out of him but didn’t. LVB became a court musician in Bonn by the age of eleven, and was composing variations, sonatas, and lieder by the age of twelve.
And then he stopped composing for almost five years. No explanation, although his mother died during this period, and teenage Ludwig was supporting the family. Then, in 1790, a burst of activity. These lapses in work, followed by insane productivity, were to become characteristic of the composer. In 1792, the drunken father died and young Ludwig hightailed it to Vienna, making a name for himself as a keyboard virtuoso. Some thought his playing harsh and disturbing. Almost everyone thought his manners were execrable. Coming from Bonn put Beethoven firmly “from the wrong side of the Rhine” among the snobby Viennese. As a girl from South Boston, Sarah could relate. Still, despite the uncouth manners and independent streak, the musician was courted by the nobility. Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz was twenty, Ludwig van Beethoven twenty-two when they met. But Prince Lobkowicz was hardly LVB’s only patron. In fact, less was known about the relationship between the two men than was known about other relationships Beethoven had with different benefactors. Which made the letters that had been found and restituted back to the family sort of exciting. Puzzling, too, in some cases.
Sarah forced herself to leave the sunshine and beauty of the Prague Castle grounds and returned to her monastic cell, shooing away Moritz, who wasn’t allowed in the workrooms. Today’s task involved going through Luigi’s Fourth Symphony orchestrations page by page and determining that each page was there, not a forgery, and in acceptable condition. In his own hand, Beethoven had carefully written out the parts for every single instrument, from flute to timpani. She used a microscope to examine each sheet of paper and the ink, as well as the shape of the letters and musical notes. Like most people’s, Beethoven’s writing shifted with his mood but was still basically consistent.
Beethoven’s moods. It still blew her away that she was sitting here, touching (with gloves, but still) pieces of paper that Beethoven had touched. When he had written the Fourth in 1806, he was still a black-haired young man, not the white-mopped madman of later years. Looking through the microscope at the way the nib of Beethoven’s pen had dug into the yellowed parchment as he wrote out the viola’s part, Sarah felt a chill up her spine. She stopped for a stcope at moment and listened to make sure no one was coming, then slipped off her left glove and gently put her index fingertip against an emphatically marked quarter note. She was startled to feel a little electric zing, but chalked it up to the polyester content of the gloves, hot weather, and static electricity. That’s what her father would have said. She put the glove back on.
Sarah sighed and stretched. Hours had a way of slipping by when she was working like this. Bending down, her eye was caught by a Post-it note that Sherbatsky must have stuck above the work table. In the stifling summer heat, it had come unstuck and fluttered down onto the orchestration for the bassoon. Sarah read the note: “Luigi—Prince L 12/31/06 Nelahozeves.” There were two asterisks below it. (Sherbatsky never gave grades, but if one turned in exceptional work, he would return it with an asterisk marked on top. Sarah was his only pupil ever to receive two asterisks.)
Sarah flipped through the binder of xeroxed correspondence between Beethoven and Prince Lobkowicz that she had made for reference purposes. “The 7th,” as he was known among the scholars at the palace, had been scrupulous in keeping copies of all his correspondence. Actually, he sometimes didn’t open his correspondence and some of the letters to him had been read for the first time years after his death—but he didn’t throw anything out. Neither did his heirs. Even the Nazis had left the papers alone.
There was a note from Luigi to the prince dated December 15, 1806, expressing regret that Luigi couldn’t make it to the Christmas ball. There was another on January 16 from the prince thanking Luigi for the gift of an Aztec amulet vial. Hmmm. No New Year’s Eve letter. She wondered how Sherbatsky knew about the December 31 letter if there was no copy of it, and no mention of it in the other correspondence. The gift of the Aztec amulet was interesting, too. Luigi wasn’t much of a gift-giver. He was pretty stingy.
Deciding to do a little detective work, Sarah obediently locked the door of the workroom behind her (Prince Max had insisted on this measure) and headed down to Miles’s office. If they could find the Aztec amulet, it would make a nice part of the display.
• • •
“Yes, Huitzlipochtli,” said Miles, in response to her query about the amulet. “I’m told that’s the name of the figure depicted on it. We haven’t found him yet, but the Nazis took a picture of him.” Miles flipped through some files and produced a grainy black-and-white photo of a small ceramic vial with a bird god on it.
“Beethoven used to call Prince Lobkowicz ‘Fitzliputzli’—his play on the name of the Aztec god Huitzlipochtli,” Sarah said.
She studied the photo for a second, then laughed out loud.
“Guess what Huitzlipochtli was famous for?”
Miles smiled and crossed his arms, waiting.
“The Aztecs believed he ate blood and hearts, so they made a human sacrifice in his honor every day.”
“To Beethoven it probably was. That was what he was teasing Prince Lobkowicz about, that he was expecting his pound of flesh. Beethoven sh.ace="had to tear his own heart out and put it down on paper in order to keep his patron happy. The vial is for his own blood.”
“Conjecture,” Miles said.
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “But I bet I’m right.”
“Well, if we find the amulet, we could display it with the letter,” Miles said. “If you think it’s of interest.”
Sarah felt a satisfying rush of power and, beyond that, a feeling of pride that she had deciphered Beethoven’s joke. Most people didn’t get Luigi’s sense of humor.
Miles turned back to his computer. “Eleanor was looking for you. She’s going out to Nelahozeves tomorrow and wondered if you wanted to ride along.”
“I do. There are a bunch of notes Sherbatsky left about things to look up there. Maybe I’ll go dig around. See what I can find.”
Miles looked sharply at her. “Whatever you find, bring it straight to me.”
“Of course.”
Sarah was glad for the chance to go to Nelahozeves with Eleanor. Nearly all the originals of correspondence were kept there in the library, and technically all the academics had access to them. The catch was that only Max had the key. Since the night of the crucifix debacle, he had become more surly, withdrawn, and paranoid. According to Suzi, when she had gone to Max’s office to ask him a harmless question about missing hunting trophies, he had refused to let her in, and had all but accused her of spying. He spoke to no one but his dog, Moritz.
“He’s a nut job,” Suzi said. “You know how these Hapsburgs are all inbred. Look at him, he’s the exact image of every one of his relatives going back five hundred years. That’s not healthy.”
