by Magnus Flyte
It felt good to be moving, so Sarah kept walking, trying to focus on her surroundings and not on Max’s mysterious disappearance, or Andy, or Sherbatsky. She crossed Cech Bridge, wandering into Josefov, the old Jewish section of Prague. She waved to the statue of Rabbi Loew.
“Rabbi Loew created the golem, a man out of dirt from the riverbank below,” a tour guide was announcing to a group of rapt Japanese schoolgirls.
“According to legend,” Sarah muttered. She hated this mixing of fact and fiction, especially in talking to children. Why confuse them about what was real and what was not?
Sarah passed the high-end glass shops on Paris Street. This is what tourists do, she told herself. They stroll. They gaze. She scanned the goblets, vases, plates, and tumblers on display. They were beautiful, and she should go in and buy something for her mother. Except her mother would be too worried about how much it might have cost to ever enjoy this kind of thing.
Sarah kept going and arrived in Old Town Square just in time to catch the rays of the setting sun reflected off the golden twin spires of the Church of Our Lady Before Týn. A puppet troupe was setting up, and a portly bearded man in Elizabethan dress was explaining to a gathering group of tourists the plot of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, while the black-clad puppeteers got their papier-mâché creations ready to begin the show.
“The action takes place in Venice,” announced the man in tights. “For English audiences, Venice was synonymous with all things decadent and sinful. Corrupting wealth, greed, thievery, prostitution, disease, incest, murder . . .”
The ominous feeling was back. Where was Max? Hoping he would appear, she turned away from the puppet theater and wandered across the square to look at the Astronomical Clock, which had been drawing tourists since 1490. Sarah gazed up at a figure on the façade of the gothic stone tower: a skeleton, holding an hourglass in one hand and a bell on a rope in the other. Death at every turn, she thought.
“When the hour strikes you will see a parade of the Apostles in the little windows,” said a familiar bassoon voice behind her. She turned to see Nicolas standing there in all his tiny formality. “But it is not impressive. I wouldn’t wait if I were you.”
“Nicolas. Are you following me?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?” asked Sarah.
“I like to pay a visit to the master.” The little man pointed across the square to the Týn church. “He is buried there. I come to make sure he hasn’t gotten out. That is a joke.”
Sarah frowned, trying to recall what she had read about the Týn church in the beer-soaked guidebook.
“They did exhume his body,” Nicolas said. “The first time in 1901, and then just last year. It does appear that he is really, really dead.”
“Tycho Brahe,” said Sarah, triumphantly. “He’s buried there.”
The little man bowed acknowledgment.
“Why are you following me?” Sarah repeated.
“I’m your protector.”
Sarah stifled a laugh. Yes, she wanted to say, you would take a bullet for me as long as it was aimed for somewhere below four-foot-six. “Why do I need protection? What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
“I don’t know what you know, so I don’t know what you don’t know. Come have an aperitif with me. They make an excellent Bellini at the Four Seasons. Best one outside of Venice.”
Sarah sighed but made no move to follow him. The puppet master’s words about Venice echoed in her mind. Corruption. Theft. Murder. “When you picked me up at the airport, you had just come from Venice,” she said. “Why were you there?”
“To pick up a Sassoferrato that had ended up at the Doge’s Palace. One of Hitler’s little gifts to Mussolini. Or should I say ‘regift,’ since it came from the Lobkowicz’s collection.”
“And that’s what was in the trunk?”
Sar>He nodded.
“Did Max ask you to leave something in Venice?” She continued prodding.
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
“A birthday bouquet of flowers for Marchesa Elisa. She pronounced them ‘dreadful’ and threw them in the canal. A lover’s spat, I suspect.”
Lovers?
“I thought the marchesa person was his cousin?” Sarah frowned.
“Distant cousin, yes.” Nicolas waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
“No, you left something in the safe at the Hotel Gritti Palace,” Sarah said, trying to dismiss this insinuation (and how much it irritated her). “Something that Max wanted hidden. What was it?”
“What, you think I’m one of those court dwarfs from the sixteenth century?” Nicolas’s voice was suddenly hostile. “Privy to all the secrets of the royal family, because they were considered to be nothing more than a talking dog?”
“No one considers you a talking dog.”
“Then come with me.”
Sarah sighed again. This kind of thing was exceptionally annoying. If you were not attracted to someone, they automat
ically assumed it was because you could not see past their physical flaw, oddity, or anomaly, real or imaginary. “It’s my freckles, isn’t it?” sobbed one freshman on her doorstep. “No,” she told him. “It’s your personality.”
But she couldn’t be cruel to Nicolas. He had fashioned himself as her protector, though she felt that his feelings went a little more below the belt. And besides, she had grown out of that sort of casual cruelty. Unrequited lust was not something to exploit.
Or was it? Was Max really involved romantically with Marchesa Elisa? “Lead the way,” Sarah said. “But you’re buying.”
NINETEEN
It was hard to feel even vaguely menaced when you were eating crostini with mushrooms, liver pâté, and pumpkin and pecorino cheese served by a gallant Czech waiter. From the terrace of the Four Seasons Hotel, even the shadowy spires of St. Vitus Cathedral looked less like Grimm and more like Disney.
And Nicolas was an excellent host, displaying a cosmopolitan masculinity as he ordered Sarah the artichoke and herb soufflé, chatted in faultless Italian with the sommelier, extracted a dark brown clove cigarette from an elegant case and lit it with a small gold lighter. Sarah caught a flash of the symbol on the case. A circle with a dot in the center. Where had she seen that before?
Sarah sipped her cocktail, not a simpering little Bellini, but a giant concoction of vodka, gooseberries, and kirsch. The waiter placed her old backpack on a satin-covered footstool. Sarah briefly wished she was wearing something other than jeans and a T-shirt, but probably nothing in her suitcase was as nice as the fabric on the footstool. Nicolas looked very much at home in the ritzy surroundings. F
“Tell me about where you grew up,” she asked her host, and Nicolas launched into a monologue about a Czech mother and a Spanish father and a German nanny and summers in Forte dei Marmi.
A six-foot blonde in a Pucci sheath strolled up to their table. She leaned over, showing off enormous breasts, and gave Nicolas a kiss on the mouth. A lingering kiss.
“Oksana Dolezalova, allow me to present Sarah Weston,” said Nicolas once his head had emerged from the giantess’s mouth.
“Please to met you,” said Oksana. Oksana’s cheekbones were high, her teeth white, and her boots had six-inch spike heels. Sarah felt even more like a scruffy college girl.
“Nico,” the woman purred. “I wait for you last night and you never show up.”
“Emergency,” said Nico. “I’ll make it up to you.” Oksana kissed him again, smiled at Sarah, and left.
“I have to ask,” said Sarah. “Is she a hooker? Because I’ve heard that they hang out in fancy hotels, and I’ve never seen one in real life, except, you know, on street corners in New York when you’re coming home from bars late, but that doesn’t really count.”
Nicolas frowned. “She’s my wife.”
Sarah laughed. Nicolas’s expression did not change. “Really? Oksana is . . . your wife?”
“We were married last spring a
t the palace,” said Nicolas coldly. “It was a lovely ceremony.”
Sarah sat there in silence for a moment, then came up with, “She seems really nice.”
“She is. For a hooker.”
This time Sarah did not laugh. But Nicolas did. “I’m kidding,” he said.
“I never thought she was your wife, okay? Nice try.”
“She is my wife. She’s just not a hooker. She’s a nurse.”
You could never get to the bottom of anything in Prague, Sarah thought. She now had no idea if the woman was Nicolas’s wife or not. She made herself imagine him married to Oksana. It was not easy, but Sarah decided that if the evening produced nothing more fruitful than the erosion of her own shallow tendency to judge a book by its miniature cover, it was time well spent.
“Max is quite all right,” said Nicolas.
All thoughts of Oksana disappeared. “Where is he?”
“He’s waiting for you back at the palace.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sarah stood up to leave.
“I wanted to clear some things up.”
Sarah sat back down.
“I came to see you in Boston on Max’s orders,” Nicolas said. “Miles hired you because Sherbatsky asked him to, but Max sent me to vet you. It did seem an interesting .&nstie?”
The little man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a photograph, handing it to Sarah. It was a picture of Sarah’s fourth-grade class. Her own face was circled. It gave her chills to see it. Her gap-toothed smile. The strange yellow pantsuit with the Scottie dogs on it that had been her favorite. It was the year her father died.
“Why do you have this photo?” she asked.
“Look at it,” Nicolas said.
He pointed to a boy with ears sticking out, in the third row. He looked small and shy, his face not grown into a too-prominent nose.
Sarah shrugged and shook her head.
“Max,” said the little man, slightly exasperated.
“Max?” She brought the photo closer. Yes, the features were the same.
“Max and I were in fourth grade together?” she said, wonderingly. “He told me he grew up in California.”
“Except for one year when his father was on sabbatical in Boston,” Nicolas explained. “Max’s father wanted to ‘toughen him up,’ so he sent him to public school. Your school, as it happened.”
“He remembers me? Why didn’t he say anything?”
“Max is not sure whom to trust.”
He’s not the only one, thought Sarah. The sight of the photo and the fact that Max had kept it from her was disturbing.
“Who killed Professor Sherbatsky?” she snapped.
Nicolas frowned. “Sherbatsky jumped.”
“I’ll never believe that.”
“You will, soon. And Max didn’t kill Andy Blackman, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“So Andy is dead?”
“Andy is dead.”
“Who was he? Who took his body?”
Nicolas shrugged. “Sarah, these kinds of games have been played out in this country for a thousand years. Under the reign of the Czech kings, the Holy Roman emperors, the Hapsburgs, the Nazis, the communists—it’s been one long invasion of the body snatchers. Who are the players this time? I honestly don’t know, and to keep my own neck intact I don’t ask. I would venture to guess that Andy was neither a Czech policeman nor an American security systems installer. It might not have to do with either you or Max. So please just stick to compiling the Beethoven collection. Do your job like the other researchers, have a nice summer, and go home safe and sound. That is my advice.”
It was good advice, too. There was plenty of work to be done, work that would launch her career back in the States. She would publish about the relationship between Prince Lobkowicz and Beethoven, about the letters, about his notations on the symphonies. There was a lifetime of scholarship in the Nela archives alone. She could become the go-to Beethoven scholar for the U.S. Sarah told herself that Sherbatsky had jumped, that Andy’s death had nothing to do with her, and that even if Max had once been in her class, he was a prince now (sort nce beof) and she was from South Boston.
She sipped her drink and watched the tourists carried aloft in the balloon. Even from this distance, she could hear them scream and then laugh every time the balloon bobbed in the wind. She knew the taste in their mouths. Fear . . . and excitement.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” said Sarah at last.
Nicolas Pertusato held her stare.
“That’s what I thought you’d say.
” He then raised an eyebrow and recited:
This is the wandring wood, this errours den,
A monster vile, whom God and man does hate:
Therefore I read beware.
Fly fly (quoth then The fearefull Dwarfe)
this is no place for living men.
TWENTY
Nicolas ordered another cocktail for Sarah using only a minute hand gesture. The respectfully observant waiter leapt to obey. Sarah took an orgasmic bite of crostini. The restaurant at the Four Seasons had a Michelin star, and food was one area where Sarah didn’t mind a baroque sensibility. The more delicious things you can cram on a piece of toast, she felt, the better.
“A change of subject,” Nicolas said, leaning forward. “Tell me about Herr Beethoven. Pretend I am one of your adoring undergraduates. Blow, as they say, my mind.”
“I’m beginning to think that might be hard to do,” said Sarah, wondering if the restaurant was dark enough to actually bend down and lick her plate without causing a scene.
“Most common misconception,” Nicolas prompted, helpfully.
“That he spent a large part of his life totally deaf,” Sarah answered. “That’s kind of a big one.”
“And untrue.”
“Untrue. The truth is sadder, actually. The hearing loss was gradual, and intermittent. It would have been better for his mental health, probably, if it happened all at once. He kept hoping he would be cured, or that it would improve. And it did, sometimes. Can you imagine? One day you can hear the rattle of carriages beneath your window, your friend’s voice, five seconds of your own playing. And then the next day, nothing.”
“Better to be born into this world with your deficiencies already in place?” the little man asked. “Than lose your powers drop by drop, ever conscious of that which is being taken from you?”
“But the music got better,” Sarah said. “And I think he knew it. He did his share of railing and complaining, but he knew what he was. Even all his women troubles . . . that was mostly self-created. He didn’t want the Immortal Beloved.”
“Ah, yes, the famous letters. Very romantic.”
“Oh, give me a break,” Sarah laughed. “That’s misconception number two. Luigi as heartbroken lover. The Immortal Beloved letters are basically break-up notes. ‘Oh God, look out into the beauties of nature and comfort your heart with that which must be—’ ‘At my age I need a steady, quiet life—can that be so in our connection?’ Antonie Brentano was married with four children. She must have scared the shit out of Ludwig. All his life he had been able to safely worship these unattainable noblewomen and not lose any composing time or have to put up with PMS and diapers. An Immortal Beloved is way better than daily intimacy. That’s what the letters are about.”
“You seem very sure of this,” the little man said. “And, forgive me, a little . . . cynical for such a young woman.”
“Well, nobody can be sure of the letters,” Sarah said, choosing to ignore the accusation of cynicism. “I mean, we can’t be one hundred percent certain that Antonie is the babe in question. But it fits. She was the major woman in his life at that time. They were both here in Prague in early July 1812. It’s all been totally hashed out, believe me.”
“What about the 7th?” Nicolas asked. “Where was Prince Lobkowicz when Beethoven came to Prague?”
“I actually don’t know where the prince was in early July,” Sa
rah admitted. “Probably Vienna.”
“But he could have been here,” Nicolas suggested, tapping his spoon thoughtfully against his cup. “Why did Beethoven come to Prague in 1812?”
Sarah thought.
“Well, I don’t actually know. On the second of July he was supposed to meet up with Karl Varnhagen von Ense, but he didn’t show. Varhagen recorded this in his memoirs, along with the apology note he got from Ludwig saying that he was sorry to cancel but a ‘circumstance which I could not foresee prevented me from doing so.’”
“What was the circumstance?” Nicolas asked.
“Well, presumably it was Antonie Brentano.” Sarah shrugged. “Beethoven doesn’t say. And then he goes to Teplitz and writes the letters. But never sends them. My guess is that he read them over and decided that he had kind of overdone it on the whole ‘you’re the one’ stuff.”
“There is always more than one explanation,” Nicolas said softly. “For almost everything, my dear.”
“Mind if I join you?”
Max, dressed impeccably as always in a dark three-piece suit, didn’t wait for a reply. He pulled out the chair next to Sarah and sat down.
“We good?” he asked the little man.
“All clear,” Nicolas responded brightly. “Oksana spotted someone from BIS earlier, but she tipped me off immediately. And I don’t think he noticed us at all, actually. As Sarah correctly pointed out, a five-star hotel attracts a five-star prostitute. He left with a redhead about forty-five minutes ago. The Minister of Culture is at the far left table having dinner with, I’m fairly certain, Neil Diamond. Otherwise it’s just tourists.”
