City of Dark Magic

by Magnus Flyte

  Sarah tried to think. She thought about Sherbatsky and wondered what the professor had seen when he took the drug. The drug. Where did it come from? It was dangerous. It was wonderful. Max. Max thought someone was trying to frame him, and her recent interaction with Miles offered some proof of that.

  Max. The drug. What was in that drug? She had traveled back in time . . . no. She stopped herself. Max had given her a scientific explanation for what she had seen—something about glial cells. Traces of energy, like the lingering impression of a lightbulb on your retina after you close your eyes.

  Sarah opened her eyes. Alessandro had talked to her about glial cells. And the dark matter of the universe. She hadn’t spoken to Sandro all summer, just a few e-mail exchanges to make sure he had paid the electric bill and that no one else had broken into the apartment.

  Alessandro might be able to tell her more about glial cells. It was early evening in Boston. Sarah climbed out of the sub-basement, and made her way up to the roof of the palace, the best place for cell reception. People took cigarette breaks up here, and the view was spectacular. Sarah took deep breaths of the foggy night air, admiring the scattered lights spread out across Prague. The dark spires of the innumerable churches cut into the night sky like teeth. She walked along the roof, examining the different views of the city, feeling the night air, trying to get amped up for some safecracking.

  It was strange how much the real city looked exactly like the insanely precise cardboard model begun as a hobby in 1826 by Antonin Lagweil that was now housed in the Prague City Museum. Sarah had hoofed it over to the exhibition in order to get a good look at the city as Beethoven had seen it. Not all that much had changed since 1826. Less horse manure to wade through now, no doubt, but probably the same number of crazy-eyed marionette vendors. Down on the banks of the river she could just pick out the Rudolfinum, where Pols would play tomorrow. She could see the walls of the old Jewish quarter, and closer below her, the big Malostranská metro station with its crazy quilt of tram tracks around it. There was a bar there where one night she had been drafted into a multilingual Ping-Pong tournament that had almost devolved into violence.

  She walked to the other side of the building and looked down into the courtyards of the castle complex, which also looked sort of fake, like the cheap 3-D paper models they sold in the St. Vitus gift shop. No one about except a lone figure crossing the courtyard carrying something large. Laundry, she thought. A big bag of laundry.

  Her view was suddenly obscured by a thicker bank of fog, and she shivered, and dialed Alessandro’s number.

  As her phone rang through, she heard a warning beep. Shit, it was almost out of battery. Why hadn’t she checked that? Now she would have to quickly say, “Hi, how’s your summer? Can stimulated glial cells make you see traces of energy from the past? Oh, oops, I have to go.”

  Damn it.

  “Ciao, bella! We were just talking about you!” Sarah could hear music playing in the background. It sounded like Bailey’s recorder.

  Beep, said Sarah’s phone.

  “Bailey come over to drop off mail from your office,” Alessandro said. “I make him cocktake him cil. He play me ‘Merry Wenches A-Washing Their Wimples.’ Very funny madrigal.”

  “Ha. Listen, do you have anything you can e-mail me about glial cells?”

  “What?” Alessandro laughed. “What you say. Eels? Bailey, Sarah wants to know about eels!”

  Beep.

  “Sarah,” said Bailey, who had evidently grabbed the phone. “How’s Prague?”

  “It’s great. Loving it. Can you put Sandro back on?”

  Beep.

  “You have a letter here from Professor Sherbatsky,” Bailey said, with a slightly more somber tone. “I guess he must have sent it before he . . . you know.”

  The hair on Sarah’s arms stood up. Sherbatsky had written to her! Maybe it was about the location of the missing letter between Luigi and Prince Lobkowicz. Maybe it had to do with the drug, or Max.

  “My phone’s about to die,” Sarah shouted. “Bailey, open the letter, okay? Read it to me. Right now, be quick.”

  “Okay, hold on.”

  Sarah looked at her watch: 1:15.

  “Okay,” Bailey said. “Here it is. Oh. It’s just a doodle.”

  “A doodle?” Sarah shrieked, feeling a little hysterical.

  “It’s like a circle, with a dot in the center, and then a line with . . . oh, Alessandro is saying it’s like something that’s on your ceiling. Huh. Listen, you still want me to send it or should—”

  The phone went dead.

  The symbol that had been drawn on the ceiling. What was that about? As last messages go, it was a totally sucky one.

  Sarah bent down and tried to trace what she remembered of the symbol in the gravel of the roof. After a few minutes, she thought she had it.

  Sarah couldn’t be certain, but she thought that was the symbol she had glimpsed on Max’s cigarette case. Or was it the symbol on the cigarette case that she was remembering? The brain did funny things.

  Sarah stepped around the skylights and over to the door to the stairs. She turned the handle and pulled, but it wouldn’t open. She pulled again, as hard as she could. It didn’t budge. She realized in horror that she hadn’t blocked it open when she had come out here, and it had locked behind her. But hadn’t she blocked it? There was a little cast-iron dog that all the researchers used to hold the door open. It was one of those automatic gestures, like tossing your keys on the hall table, so she couldn’t be sure she had done it. But it would be odd if she hadn’t. Well, the point was, she was stuck on the roof. Crap. It was getting colder by the second, not to mention that she was supposed to be cracking Miles’s safe with Max in forty-five minutes. Forty-two minutes, now.

  Sarah walked around the roof, looking for another way down. There’s always Sherbatsky’s way, she thought with a shiver, unwilling to look over the edge. She peered down through the skylights into the third-floor workrd-floorrooms, but saw only the faint glow of security lights, no one moving below. She walked back over to the edge of the roof, and noticed with relief that the figure she had seen earlier was crossing back across the courtyard, now minus the laundry. If she got his attention, she could get him to come up and let her down.

  She whistled, but the figure was running, no doubt anxious to get home after a long day’s work, and didn’t stop.

  The fog was making her thin black T-shirt wet, and she began to shiver for real. She leaned over the south wall of the roof and considered the scaffolding. Too far to jump. She could see little red dots among the beams that she hadn’t noticed before. Cameras, she thought with a start. Was there a camera in Miles’s office? Would Max know that? Had Andy installed them? She was not having trouble staying awake now.

  She heard a nearby sound, almost underneath her feet, and ran to the skylight, peering down. Someone moving slowly, with a mop. She knocked on the skylight. The person stopped, looked around, not sure where the knocking was coming from. The woman—Sarah could see now that it was a woman—started mopping again. Sarah knocked again. The woman looked up. Sarah waved, not sure if the woman could see her or not. But the woman waved back, and shuffled off. Sarah heaved a sigh of relief.

  A few moments later, the door opened.

  “Thank you!” Sarah almost shouted. Her savior was a woman in her sixties in a long ragged cardigan, hair pulled back into a sleek bun. Her shuffling gait made her look older. Sarah followed her slowly down the stairs to the third floor. She stopped and looked back. There was no cast-iron dog doorstopper. Who had moved it?

  “I am slow,” said the woman, going one stair at a time. “Excuse me.”

  “No problem. I went out to make a phone call, and the door locked behind me,” Sarah explained, following the woman down the stairs. “Thank God you came along.”

  “I am happy I can help you,” said the woman. “I am usually alone here at night. Just me and ghosts.”

  Sarah smiled, thinking, You h
ave no idea.

  “Your English is very good,” said Sarah. As Janek had explained at dinner, usually anyone over thirty had not studied English, since under the communists it was strictly verboten, or whatever the Czech word was for verboten.

  “Yes,” sighed the woman. “I was to go to America.”

  Sarah hesitated. She should really go and find Max and warn him that there was someone else awake in the building. But the woman seemed so lonely, and she had saved her. Sarah checked her watch: 1:37.

  “Did you ever go?” asked Sarah. “To America?”

  The woman shook her head. She shuffled back to her mop and bucket. Her gait looked so painful. She must have terrible arthritis, thought Sarah.

  “I was dancer,” she said. “Principal ballerina in the Prague National Theater Ballet.”

  “Wow,” said Sarah. There was something regal and dancerlike to her posture, now that she mentioned it, despite the arthritis. “That must have been exciting.” Sarah didn’t really know much about ballet.

  “Yes. But no, how you Americans say it, artistic freedom. We were going on tour, to New York, 1978. I had never in my life thought of defecting. But that year, I think of it. There was boy, here in Prague. Jack, an American visiting his mother’s family. We were both sixteen year old. My first love.”

  Sarah realized with a shock that the woman was not in her sixties. She was barely fifty.

  “He tell me all about America. Teach me English. One day he say he find American woman in Prague who can help me. She can arrange things. I am nervous. I never see this woman, she work for your government, but in secret intelligence, I am thinking. Your CIA. I talk to her on phone. ‘I will help you,’ she say. ‘Thank you,’ I cry. I tell her I will never forget her. Every day, every breath, I will think of her. I suppose meet her on certain night. She will have papers and a car for us. We will get to Berlin. I tell no one. Not even family. That night after performance I am coming out of Lenin metro station. Now is called Dejvická. A black car come out of nowhere. Hit me. I fall to ground, screaming. The car stop. A man come over. He look at me. He see that I am mostly okay. ‘Help me up,’ I say. ‘Please, I am okay.’ I think I can still go to meet Jack. Then man grab my arms. Hold me. The car back up. He hold me while the car back over my feet. Both ankle. All bones crushed to dust. He get in car and drive away.” Sarah stared at her, but the woman did not say anything more. She picked up her mop and swabbed the parquet.

  “Did you ever see the boy again?” Sarah asked. “Did he know why you didn’t show up?” Did the guy spend the last thirty-plus years thinking that a fickle ballerina had changed her mind and broken his heart, or was he the one who had ratted on her?

  The woman shook her head. “I am out of ballet. Not allowed even to teach. My parents lose jobs. My aunts and uncles lose jobs. No one want to talk to m

  e. I think I will die of starvation. But Yuri Bespalov, head of National Museum, take pity on me. He give me job here. I am lucky I work here many, many years, while it is state museum. Every night I make sure it is clean for next day’s visitors. I scrape all the gum. I clean toilet. But I am worried now. Museum is private. Run by Americans. I am old woman, ‘insurance liability’ they say. I am afraid I will lose job. I have nothing. Please ask them to let me keep job.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Sarah. It sounded hollow. She was intrigued though, to hear Yuri Bespalov’s name. He didn’t sound like a KGB agent. He gave the poor woman a job. Maybe Pols was wrong about that.

  “Thank you for saving me. I’m Sarah,” she added.

  “Stefania,” said the woman.

  Sarah looked at her watch. It was 2:07.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The hallway leading to Miles’s office was nearly pitch-black. Sarah felt her way, sliding her hands against the wall. It was 2:15 a.m. The door, of course, was shut.

  Sarah crouched down on her heels, trying to peer through the narrow crack between the door and the floor. No light. Sarah stood up and put her ear against the door, listening intently. Nothing. She pressed her ear harder, straining, holding her breath.

  One small warning creak and then she was grabbed from behind, a gloved hand clamping down over her mouth, stifling the scream she didn’t have time for. Arms held her tight. For a second Sarah thought she might actually pee from fright, but then animal instinct kicked in and she reflexively prepared for a countermove. Luckily, she also inhaled.

  “You’re late,” breathed Max, into her ear.

  You’re lucky I know your scent, Sarah thought. Or you’d be minus a testicle right now.

  Max released her and flicked on a tiny flashlight, holding it under his chin and giving himself the traditional horror movie face. He held up a key and, rather unnecessarily considering the circumstances, a gloved finger to his lips. Sarah waited tensely as Max unlocked the door, opened it just wide enough for them to slip through, and shut it behind them, sliding the bolt shut. Sarah took a deep breath.

  “Are you okay?” Max hissed, before Sarah could ask him the same question.

  “Later,” she mouthed. They had business to do. Max handed her a pair of gloves and another tiny flashlight. These were barely adequate. The office was even darker than the hallway. Sarah couldn’t see Max, or, for that matter, her own gloved hand. She tried to re-create the office in her mind as she had seen it in daylight. She swung her light to the side, and caught a glimpse of the doorknob to a closet. Right. The safe was in the opposite corner, but between it and them was a desk, a chair, stacks of papers and boxes, and potentially a shitload of things made out of glass, china, or tenth-century bones. She reached out and found Max’s back. “Let’s work our way around by the wall,” she hissed, jabbing her penlight toward the closet. Max nodded and they inched over, barely daring to lift up their feet.

  “Fuck it, maybe we should hit the lights,” Max whispered, but then grabbed her hand. Sarah froze. She could hear it, too, voices outside in the hallway, and footsteps. And then Miles’s voice, apologetically: “My office is a bit of a mess right now.”

  Sarah lunged for the closet door, praying like hell it was unlocked. It was, and Sarah had just enough time to shove herself and Max through, plunging face-first into a wool coat, as she heard Miles sliding his key into the outer door. Sarah twisted, reaching up to stop the coat hanger from banging into the wall, and knocked into the handle of something (a broom? A seventeenth-century rifle? A skeleton?). She just managed to catch it before it fell. Max, bent double beside her, grabbed her hair. Miles was coming in now, snapping on the overhead light.

  Sarah turned her head. She hadn’t been able to fully close the closet door behind them, but it was less than a quarter inch open. Enough for a little light to filter in. Enough for Miles’s voice to be fairly clear, even through the pounding of her heart.

  Enough for Miles to notice it was open.

  “I keep a bottle of scotch here,” Miles was saying. “Join me?”

  For a wild instant, Sarah thought he might somehow be addressing them, behind the door, but then there was a grumbled assent, and the sound of clinking glasses. The squeaking of chair springs.

  “Please, my friend,” said an accented voice, which Sarah identified as belonging to the Czech scholar, Janescholar,k something, she had met at dinner. “This light is a little harsh for my old eyes. Would you?”

  “Oh certainly,” Miles replied. They heard the snap of the brass desk lamp turning on, footsteps dangerously close to the closet door, and then the overhead light went off. Now only the faintest of light made its way through the door crack. Sarah could hear Max’s breath beside her. Like her heartbeat, it seemed incredibly loud. Max shifted his weight and to Sarah’s ears it was like thunder crackling. All it takes is one little squeak, she thought. And we are absolute toast. She’d never be able to talk her way out of this. This was an unbelievably stupid plan.

  Sarah held her breath, willing Max to do the same. Her ears strained to follow the conversation.

  “I apologize a
gain for disturbing you,” Miles said.

  “Nonsense. I slept most comfortably on the plane, and so I am now in the white night of jet lag. I was glad you called the hotel. But, forgive me, why so much secrecy?”

  Sarah could hear Miles sighing heavily.

  “I have something to show you,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave the palace with it. And yet, I don’t want it here either. I need advice.”

  “Ah,” said the old man. “You intrigue me.”

  “This isn’t intriguing,” Miles said sharply. “It’s not some scholarly puzzle, Janek. I’m in over my head.”

  More sounds of movement. Was that the safe being opened? Now that her eyes were adjusting to the dark, she could see Max beside her fairly well. The closet was shallow, nowhere to hide and nothing to hide behind. There were boxes at their feet, some cleaning supplies, running shoes, umbrellas, a soccer ball. The sleeve of a coat dangled in Max’s face. The soccer ball lay right next to his heel. They looked like cartoon characters, caught with their hands in the cookie jar, arrested. Their glances met. Sarah found it steadying, especially when Max released her hair and took her hand. He squeezed. Hold on. Keep still.

  Sarah heard the rustling of papers.

  “I want you to look at this,” Miles was saying. “Don’t touch it. Let me turn the pages.”

  What followed seemed like an eternity of silence. They could hear absolutely nothing from the office but the occasional sound of a turning page, a clinking glass. Sarah felt a cramp growing in her calf. Her gloved hand inside of Max’s grew hot. Her ear itched. The smells of the closet separated themselves into distinct entities: cardboard, orange disinfectant, mold, feet. The fear of coughing, sneezing, or farting grew so intense that she had trouble not doing any of these things. She clenched her ass cheeks and tried to take shallow breaths, which made it all worse. Beside her, Max swayed slightly. Was he falling asleep? Finally, she heard another deep sigh and then Janek’s voice.