by Magnus Flyte
• • •
A man in uniform arrived on a motorbike and asked for documents, but Eleanor was acting as if she had never been in an accident before. “I don’t speak Czech, I don’t speak Czech,” Eleanor kept repeating, her voice quavering.
“Es tut uns schrecklich leid. Wir sind Amerikaner, die Dvorák Liebe zu viel,” said Sarah calmly. There was a dramatic pause where it seemed that no one spoke German even though by Sarah’s calculation they were only about eighty miles from the German border. “Wir arbeiten hier auf der Burg.” Sarah pointed up at the castle. Still no sign they were understanding any of this. Sarah wondered if she and Eleanor were about to be embroiled in a diplomatic incident. “Für Prinz Max.” Suddenly they all smiled and looked up at the castle and said, “Ano, Max, Max,” and someone translated into Czech for the others and they all smiled and nodded.
“Whionno
“German,” said Sarah, surprised that Eleanor couldn’t hear the difference between a Slavic language and a Germanic one. “I’m a Beethoven scholar, remember? Kind of goes with the territory. Dvorák wasn’t opening any doors, but Prince Max seems to be popular.” Sarah took a moment to wonder why the villagers would look kindly upon a young American reclaiming what had technically been their property for sixty years and locking himself inside.
A new struggle began as a tow truck appeared, and the policeman made it clear that the damaged van and its contents would be coming with him. He was extremely reluctant to let Sarah and Eleanor remove Max’s drum set from the back.
Finally, the policeman gave them an incomprehensible lecture, frowned over the documents but handed them back, and the tow truck carried off the van. The villagers disappeared, leaving Sarah and Eleanor by the side of the road. Sarah wasn’t perfectly clear on where the van had been taken, or when it would be ready again, or whether it was up to them to call the insurance company or whether the policeman would, though she had nodded sagely when spoken to in Czech.
Giving up on the idea of touring Dvorák’s house, Eleanor and Sarah made their way up a long set of stairs to the castle, lugging Max’s drum kit.
Sarah took in the five stories of windows, the sgraffito stonework in shades of beige and brown, the small windows at the top, and immediately fell in love with the place. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of light in a high dormer window. Almost as if a mirror had flashed—a signal? Perhaps someone was being held hostage in the place. Mrs. Rochester?
A cobblestoned bridge led over the old moat, which contained just a little stagnant rainwater and probably some healthy frogs.
The thing about Renaissance castles, Sarah decided while standing in the central courtyard, was that they were elegant, while medieval castles were massive. This castle felt like just the right size for a really good party. There was still the sense of being prepared for a siege and all that, but the large arched windows would, she guessed, let lots of light into the second-floor rooms, and even the two little dormers atop each wing didn’t look too stuffy for one’s servants. Or hostages. Eleanor knocked timidly on the fifteen-foot-high wooden door.
Nothing happened.
“What if he refuses to let us in?” said Eleanor. “We could be here all night.”
Sarah decided it was time for bold action. She grabbed cymbals from Max’s drum set and, doing her best impression of a toy monkey, began crashing them together. Eleanor laughed and covered her ears.
There was a distant sound of barking and the massive door swung open. Standing there was . . . a Chihuahua, tan in color, and wearing a way too large leather collar with brass medallions, as if it had once been a much larger dog left too long in the dryer. True to the breed, it was barking madly in a horrible high-pitched shriek.
“Darling,” said Eleanor, leaning down to pet the thing. “You opened the door for us. How clever. Ow!” she said a moment later, standing back up with a bleeding finger. “He bit me.”
They left the drum set th shwhere it was and strolled into the ground floor of the castle, which had a high, barrel-vaulted ceiling. Though the interior had been relatively well-maintained since 1948, having been used as a museum, it still showed inevitable signs of wear, with lots of water stains in the corners, and some plaster falling down.
They turned a corner into a long hallway lined with doors. Sarah reached for a light switch, but nothing happened.
“Power’s out,” she said. “The wiring in this place must be scary.” Her father would be horrified.
“I suspect that’s more about nonpayment of bills,” said Eleanor. “Miles says the electric here runs to the tens of thousands. And the roof leaks.”
“Well, we need to find the library,” said Sarah.
“We need to find the prince,” said Eleanor.
“Max?” Sarah called out. “Are you here?” Nothing. Not a sound. “Okay, you check that wing, I’ll check this one.” Sarah watched as the Chihuahua followed tasty Eleanor, its nails making little clicking noises on the stone floor.
Sarah climbed a long set of stone stairs to the next floor, where she was pleased to see that the arched windows did indeed let in a lot of light. Sarah continued to call out Max’s name, but got no response. At the end of the hallway, she had a choice of two doors. She tried the left one, and it opened into a narrow passageway. She heard a distant voice.
“Max?” she called. “It’s Sarah Weston. The Beethoven girl?”
She walked down the narrow dark passage and turned a corner into a large hall fit for a group of carousing knights. Even in the gloom she could make out peeling frescoes in pastels, a huge arched ceiling, and a massive fireplace.
Max was standing just to the left of the fireplace, staring at something.
“Max?” she said. He ignored her. Irritated, Sarah moved in front of him, nearly stepping into the empty fireplace.
Max looked at her wildly. “My God,” he said. “Are you insane? The fire.” He began beating at her body, as if it were in flames.
For a slender guy, he was very strong. And clearly on something . . . a hallucinogen of some kind. Sarah tried wrestling with him and then remembered her training. A woman’s strength is in her legs. She kicked at Max’s crotch as hard as she could.
Max collapsed to the ground. His eyes were clouded with pain, and then they suddenly cleared and he looked up at Sarah. “Sorry. That was weird,” he croaked. And then he passed out.
“Eleanor!” Sarah called out. “I need a little help here!” Sarah leaned over Max. It was her first chance to study him up close. He looked remarkably like his namesake and grandfather, which was to say he looked like nearly all the Lobkowicz portraits she had seen. He had the long, aquiline nose, deep-set eyes, the fine hair, and high forehead. An aristocrat’s hands: long, white, and slender.
Eleanor arrived with the dog. “My God, what happened?” she gasped, as her eyes fell on Max. “He’s bleeding.”
“Fainted, I think,” said Sarah, not wanting to go into details of to ed over Mhow she had drop-kicked the boss. “Maybe you could find some water or food or something?”
Eleanor nodded and scurried off. Sarah picked up Max’s wrist to check his pulse, and as she did so his startlingly blue eyes popped open.
“What the . . . ,” he said. “What happened?”
“You fainted,” said Sarah. “Right after you tried to beat imaginary flames off me.”
“It’s okay. It’s over. Wait. What are you doing here?” He looked accusingly at Sarah.
“Did you miss the part where I said you attacked me?”
Max sat up. He looked ill but not high, exactly. Was Max some kind of epileptic?
“Did I really attack you?” he said. “God. I’m sorry. God.” He sounded genuinely horrified and anxious.
“Eleanor’s coming with some water if she can find it,” said Sarah. “Are you okay? Should I call a doctor?”
Max shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“Did you take something?” Sarah demanded. “Are you tripping or som
ething?”
“What? No, it’s none of your business.” Max frowned, the haughty arrogance returning to his voice even as he struggled to stand up. He refused to say anything more and when Eleanor returned, Max gave them the key to the library and stalked off.
“Oh dear,” Eleanor sighed. “What an embarrassment. Passed out cold on the floor. Not my idea of a prince at all.”
Sarah got another shock when they entered the library. She was expecting walls of shelves, which there were, but she wasn’t expecting rows of cardboard boxes six or more feet high. The boxes, only some of which were labeled, had turned the library into a maze.
“What the hell?” said Sarah, pulling back the dusty curtains to let in some light.
“No sun,” said Eleanor. She handed Sarah a headlamp.
Apparently there were literally thousands of boxes of family papers that no one had gone through in sixty, maybe a hundred years.
“Most of this is junk,” Eleanor said. “Letters, estate papers, bills of sale, dance cards—it’s insane.”
“But . . .” Sarah said. “What if you’re looking for one particular letter?”
Eleanor laughed. “Well, you try to read what’s written on the boxes, and hope for the best,” she said. “And anything you open: number it, label it, and make a record for Miles. There’s a clipboard here, use these forms. Be as specific as possible.”
Eleanor, having worked in the library before, had a rough sense of which boxes corresponded to the period she was studying. She moved off into the labyrinth. Meanwhile Sarah looked for anything with Sherbatsky’s handwriting on it. As she walked through the narrow aisles of boxes, headlamp on, feeling like a miner, she couldn’t help thinking that if there were an earthquake they would literally be buried in Lobkowicz papers. All for a fistful of dollars from that shit Max, who may have drugged Sherbatsky and convinced hid chere were m to step out a window.
Feeling resentful and wondering how many hundreds of strains of mold she was breathing, Sarah picked a random box off the top of a column and took it down. The ancient tape disintegrated in her hands. The writing on the box was in German. On top was a shipping list of items that were sent to a warehouse at Prague University to be cataloged for “use of the Führer reserve.” A chill went up Sarah’s spine. The memo was dated May 28, 1942. Sarah was holding a genuine Nazi document in her hands. She sniffed it. Dust, age, and what? Cigar smoke? Evil? She scanned the memo, but didn’t find anything relevant to her search. She put the top back on the box and labeled it as Miles had instructed: today’s date, her initials, the contents of the box, and its location in the library according to numbers someone had duct-taped to the floor. The next box she grabbed had clippings from the social pages of various newspapers in several languages from 1934 to 1937. Wedding announcements, it looked like. Sarah labeled and recorded again. After a couple of hours, she finally came across a box labeled with Sherbatsky’s handwriting, and marked with his signature double asterisk. Sarah opened it up. There were piles of handwritten sheet music, mostly not identified, all of which seemed to be out of order. Sarah groaned at the difficulty of the task: to read the scores, attempt to date them, figure out what music belonged to which piece, who it was composed by, and for what occasion.
Sarah squatted down and began to go through the sheet music. Most of it appeared to be nineteenth century, amateur work, not particularly important or worthy of the double asterisk. At the bottom of the pile she found a leather-bound book, badly damaged, containing woodcut drawings and crabbed text in Latin. Was this important? It didn’t seem to have anything to do with music. Sarah peered at the gruesome drawings. In between two pages she found a letter in German, dated October 3, 1974. Sarah skimmed it, and caught the phrase Aztec Amulett, ein Geschenk von Ludwig van Beethoven. Excited, she began to read more carefully from the beginning. Maybe this was a clue to where the Aztec amulet had ended up. A scholarly thrill ran through her.
The letter, however, was frustrating. It was written by a Herr Gottlieb, who seemed to be a 1970s Miles-type equivalent at Nelahozeves. The letter was addressed to a functionary at the National Museum in Prague. It complained, with East German fastidiousness, of a number of items being removed from the Nelahozeves storage facility without proper documentation. The Aztec amulet was listed as one such item. Also a gold, sapphire-encrusted cigarette case, very valuable, which had once belonged to the 6th Prince Lobkowicz. Herr Gottlieb began the letter in a spirit of outrage, then seemed to lose heart halfway through, assuring the recipient that he did not mean to accuse their esteemed director, Herr Bespalov, of unethical practices. Herr Bespalov was a man of great integrity, etcetera, etcetera. The items—idolatrous and decadent—were not appropriate for display at Nelahozeves. The National Museum in Prague was, no doubt, a more suitable place.
The letter was yellowed but not creased. She wondered if it had ever been sent or if Herr Gottlieb had decided that he didn’t want to risk annoying his superiors. She made a note to research a “Bespalov” who was connected to the National Museum. Well, she had tracked the amulet to the 1970s at least.
“Eleanor?” she called out.
“Yes?” she heard from a long way away.
“Nothing. Just checking to make sure you haven’t lef haion Pro">t me here.”
Sarah set the box aside and continued her search. Just before dark, the silence they had worked in all afternoon was interrupted by the sound of a car horn honking in the courtyard.
Brushing a few centuries’ worth of dust from her jeans, Sarah met a cobwebbed Eleanor at the library door. From the glassed-in loggia they saw Miles, and a blue Renault, below.
“Heard you had some car trouble,” said Miles when they reached the courtyard.
“I hate driving in Europe,” Eleanor wailed. “It’s so stressful.”
“It was partly my fault,” began Sarah. “I should help pay for the damage.”
Miles nodded. “That’s very correct of you, but not to worry, it’s been taken care of. I’m just glad neither one of you was injured. Where’s Max?”
“We haven’t seen much of him,” Sarah said. “We’ve been in the library all day.”
“I’m feeling rather triumphant,” said Eleanor, producing a box. “Apparently the Lobkowicz family not only purchased Ernestine’s paintings, they also collected some of her letters. I can’t wait to read her correspondence with her dressmaker!” Miles smiled somewhat mechanically.
“What about you?” he asked Sarah, gesturing to the box she was carrying.
“I actually did find a mention of the Aztec amulet.” She handed over the box. “It’s in the letter on top. And there’s a book, incunabulum of some kind. The rest is sheet music, nineteenth century. I’ll need more time with it to see if it’s interesting.”
Miles opened the door of the car, and Eleanor made for the passenger side.
Sarah thought how easy it would be to get in the car, go back to Prague, and just be the Beethoven scholar she was hired to be. But what Douglas Sexton had told her of the strange goings-on at Nelahozeves was weighing on her mind. She really needed to get some answers out of Max as to what he and Sherbatsky were up to. She had chickened out earlier, which wasn’t her style.
“You know what? I kind of want to keep working,” she said. “I think I’ll stay over and take the train back tomorrow.”
“Really?” Eleanor sounded disappointed. “But I’m making fresh pesto tonight.”
Miles frowned. “There’s no electricity or running water.”
“I’m a good camper,” Sarah countered with confidence she didn’t feel. “I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to come back here and I want to make use of the time.”
Miles looked skeptical.
“Is Max okay with you staying over?” Miles said. “He’s usually very squirrelly about people being out here.”
“He said it was fine,” lied Sarah. “I’ll do my thing and he’ll do his. I just want a few more hours to try and track down some of these things
Sherbatsky mentioned in his notes.”
“Bring whatever you find directly to me tomorrow,” Miles reminded her. The Renault crunched over the cobbles and disappeared from sight. si-1" face
• • •
“Now, if I were a prince, where would I be?” Sarah murmured, turning back to the castle. She didn’t relish the thought of searching through dark corridors for Max. But she still had the letter Jana asked her to give to him. The letter she had steamed open in a palace bathroom like some kind of Renaissance Nancy Drew. She wondered idly what it was that Max needed to keep in a maximum security safe in Venice. Was he planning on trying to quietly sell off a family heirloom? Maybe it had something to do with the drugs.
Happy to be out in the fresh air, Sarah decided to take a stroll around the garden and plan the best way to approach Max. She followed a flight of stone stairs down into a path through a grove of trees. These had finished blooming, but there were petals forming a carpet on the ground, and it was all rather magical. Sarah strolled along a walkway lined with a tall hedge. It was a lovely evening, and the weird, violent
events of the day seemed less frightening in the soft light.
She rounded a corner and saw a small pond.
And Max, leaning over and kissing someone who was stretched out in the tall grass.
Max was kissing a man.
Sarah was about to turn away, smiling, when she realized that Max wasn’t making out with the man lying on the ground. He was giving him CPR.
ր
FIFTEEN
“Max,” Sarah called, running. She dropped down to her knees next to the two men.
With a shock, she recognized the man Max was trying to revive. He was the policeman who had showed up at the accident earlier. Although now he wasn’t wearing his cop’s uniform.
