City of Dark Magic

by Magnus Flyte

  What could she do? Miles and Janek had both seen the letters, and it hads, and i seemed as if Miles was maybe intending on doing the right thing, but now he was in Washington. It seemed clear to Sarah that someone acting on Charlotte Yates’s behalf had killed Eleanor and almost certainly Andy, too. But who would listen to her? And unless she had proof, someone would end up in prison, but it wouldn’t be Yates. The task seemed impossible.

  Sherbatsky was dead, too, though Sarah had trouble accepting that Sherbatsky’s death was tied to the senator’s search for the incriminating letters. She knew it had something to do with the drug. The drug and Max.

  Max was looking for something. What was it? He seemed to trust her with certain things—like the possible existence of a secret library—and not with others.

  For right now, she tried to focus on the competition. She looked at the program again. These kids had astounding résumés, and each of them had won a major competition at least once before. Pols had never even entered one. Sarah realized with a sinking heart that Pols did not stand a chance. The other children were trained, polished performers, and had been since they were three or four years old. Pols was a genius who rarely left the house, and played only to entertain herself, Sarah, and Jose.

  The coordinator of the event came out and did the usual endless thank-yous, and introduced the members of the jury. The last name almost made Sarah shoot out of her seat.

  Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti.

  Sarah craned her head and looked up into the box where the jury members sat. The fat guy in Brooks Brothers was definitely Larry Stegner, from Juilliard. The Asians. A couple of Czechs in poorly tailored suits. That left a deeply tanned woman in a skintight satin sheath and Hermès scarf. She had the kind of unapologetically excessive glamour that only European women can pull off. Sarah saw the glint of diamonds around her neck and thought her nose could pick up the scent of the marchesa’s perfume, even from her seat in the orchestra section.

  Sarah riffled through her program, which merely said that Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti was an international expert on Beethoven. Huh? An international expert on Beethoven? How come this was the first she’d heard of it? And possibly a close personal friend of Charlotte Yates. And possibly romantically involved with Max. And now here she was in Prague. On the same day that some very nasty and mysterious things had happened.

  Feeling distinctly unsettled, Sarah focused in on the program, which was now beginning.

  Beethoven had written thirty-two piano sonatas, all of them brilliant. Sarah was impressed by the choice of the North Korean competitor. Sonata No. 4 in E-flat Major, op. 7, was a monster of a piece, dynamic, complex, and in the first movement sort of a bitch-slap to Mozart.

  It was strange to hear it played by an eight-year-old girl. Luigi had dedicated the sonata to his pupil, Countess Babette de Keglevics, and in the subtly erotic second movement Sarah had to close her eyes, to block out the fact that it was being played by a child, even a technically brilliant child.

  Next up was the Russian boy, who played Sonata No. 5, op. 10, no. 1. Sarah closed her eyes and let the heavy chords of the exposition vibrate through her. The piece was full of heroism undermined by strains of fear and hesitation, which sort of worked for a little kid performing in the world’s most prestigious competition. It petitionwas disturbingly good.

  Finally, it was Pols’s turn. Sarah leaned forward, applauding as Jose, dressed in a classic black tuxedo, led Pols, who was in red velvet, out to the Steinway. Pols settled down on the piano bench, took a deep breath, and launched into Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, op. 57. As she navigated the first of the three movements, Pols played with an increasing amount of verve that began to make Sarah nervous. People in the audience were blinking in surprise as she played as if she were possessed, her hair flying, her eyes closed. The unanswered questions Beethoven had laced the sonata with, the unstable chords, the power, grew and grew.

  Sarah found herself holding her breath for the resolution, and when it finally came she leapt to her feet—along with half the audience—and applauded wildly. The other half remained seated, clapping politely, but there was a murmuring undercurrent of disapproval running through the hall. Pols had definitely gone out on a limb, although Sarah felt it was a limb of true genius.

  She found Pols backstage during intermission.

  “It’s the way Beethoven meant it,” said Pols, looking a little pale after her exertions. Boris, in his service dog capelet, leaned against the girl, offering his massive shoulder for support.

  “I’ve never heard you play it like that before,” Sarah commented.

  “No,” said Pols, as Jose wiped the sweat from her brow with a hankie. “I could feel him better here. That’s what he was urging me to do.”

  Sarah did not doubt her. It made perfect sense. Beethoven went through harpsichords the way other people went through tissue, and this piece would have been unplayable on the instruments of his day. Pols had done Luigi proud.

  “Well,” said Sarah. “You definitely carved out some new territory for yourself. Personally I thought it kicked ass.”

  Sarah took Jose aside as Pols drank a glass of water.

  “Go straight back to Boston tomorrow morning,” she whispered. “There’s been a brutal murder at the palace.” Jose blanched.

  “Make sure Pols doesn’t talk about the Lobkowizes to anyone,” Sarah said. “It’s not safe. Keep a very close eye on her. Like, not out of your sight.”

  “No one get through me,” said Jose. “But if they do, no one get through Boris.”

  There was a hush in the audience when the president of the symphony came out to announce that the finalists were . . . Pols and Yevgeny Andropov. She had made the finals! The North Korean girl’s supporters were flushed and angry, talking loudly among themselves and gesturing toward the jury. Sarah hoped no one would be shot when they returned home.

  A hush fell over the audience. The piece that Pols and the Russian kid would both play in their duel to the death was Opus 111, Beethoven’s last piano sonata, which some considered his finest. It was dedicated to the Archduke Rudolf, Beethoven’s patron and pupil. Sarah thought about the three Rudolfs and their strange fates. Rudolf II, who had gone crazy and lost his empire. Beethoven’s Rudolf was a distant relative in the far-flung Hapsburgs, and an epileptic. The third Rudolf, for whom the theater was named, had died at age thirty in 1889 in a bizarre incident at his hunting lodgehunting . He was in love with a young woman who was not his wife, and rather than give her up, he shot her in the head and then turned the gun on himself.

  This was Prague. Every stone here seemed to have some kind of story, and most of them involved blood or people going crazy. Maybe that’s why the rest of the academics seemed willing to accept the story of Eleanor’s suicide. All summer long they had been steeped in similar tales of passion and violence. And now that she had taken the drug, Sarah knew that passion and violence were really all around them. Flickering beneath a surface of the present that was unbelievably thin . . .

  Suddenly the audience burst into applause, and Sarah realized she had zoned out during the Russian kid’s entire performance. Now it was Pols’s turn.

  Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, op. 111 is in two parts only, an unusual enough structure that Beethoven’s publisher wrote to make sure the copyist hadn’t accidentally left out the third movement. As far as anyone knew, Beethoven did not deign to respond. Sarah felt a stab of grie

  f and longing as she remembered Professor Sherbatsky lecturing on the work, quoting from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, where the fictional music teacher explains Opus 111, stuttering and shouting that “in the end art always throws off the appearance of art.”

  The first part is meant to portray the world as we know it, full of struggle and hardship. The second movement is filled with unbelievably beautiful transcendence, an escape to an almost supernatural place of peace, reconciliation, love. Sarah was hearing the music with new ears, feeling its mysticism a
nd power.

  If Pols had played with verve before, now she was a whirling dervish, her hands barely visible on the keys. The tension was almost unbearable; her thin arms hardly seemed capable of the ferocity with which she was playing. And then the second movement began. Sarah’s heart swelled. It was right, it was right. This was how it was supposed to be. Perhaps this was what Pols meant when she talked about God.

  As she played the final chord, Pols slumped across the keyboard, apparently unconscious.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The doctor wanted to take Pols to the hospital for observation, and Sarah was more than happy to accommodate this, but Pols had insisted that she just needed to sleep. Sarah, not wanting to upset the girl further, agreed to take her back to the hotel if Pollina promised to see a doctor back in Boston.

  “I didn’t win,” said Pols, sadly.

  “I think you won,” said Sarah.

  Sarah left Pols resting at the hotel with a large bowl of chicken soup with dumplings. Jose was on guard with orders to open for no one. Apparently he had packed a bowie knife in his checked luggage. Sarah looked at the serrated edge and hoped for the best. Boris placed himself across the doorway to the little girl’s bedroom.

  “Show me your teeth,” Sarah said.

  Boris bared his fangs and gave her an understanding look.

  • • •

  When Sarah returned to her room at the palace, she found Max waiting for her in the hallway.

  “Let’s go to my office,” he said, in a low voice. Sarah followed him.

  Moritz, the Czech wolfhound, raised his head from a large and extremely ratty-looking dog bed in the corner. A stuffed lion, with the heraldic two tails one saw about Prague, was nestled between his enormous paws. Sarah went over to pet him. Moritz sniffed Boris on her hands, seemed to find the scent simpatico, and went back to gnawing his lion.

  Sarah sat down in one of Max’s leather chairs, warily.

  “Eleanor was shot in the head,” Max reported. “The gun was in the netting at the base of the well. Her fingerprints were on the trigger.”

  “You don’t believe she killed herself,” Sarah said. “You heard what Miles said. Eleanor found those letters that Miles and Janek were looking at.”

  “I have a theory,” Max said. “Listen. What if the woman in those letters was Eleanor herself? She’s the right age. She could’ve been in Prague in the 1970s. She could’ve been working here undercover as an art historian. She was an art historian. She had an affair with a KGB agent and he gave her things from the palace in exchange for information. She came back here to look for the lost letters. She was at Nela. She could’ve killed Andy. Maybe he was working undercover for the CIA, looking for the letters, too.”

  “But then why would she have turned them over to Miles?” Sarah said. She wanted to tell him about Charlotte Yates, but she hesitated.

  “People do strange things,” Max sighed. “Maybe she couldn’t stand the guilt anymore. Maybe she was giving herself up.”

  For a minute Sarah wanted to believe this theory. It was certainly easier than believing that an American senator was taking hits out on people at the palace. Her mind raced back over the details of the day at Nela. Had Eleanor recognized Andy Blackman in his disguise as a Czech policeman? They had been working all afternoon in the library together, but she hadn’t actually seen Eleanor during the afternoon, and they had only communicated intermittently. There were so many strange details. Sarah watched Max’s dog lift his toy up in his jaws and make neck-breaking movements.

  “Whose Chihuahua was that?” she asked, suddenly.

  “What Chihuahua?”

  “The one at Nela when Eleanor and I met you there. It bit her.”

  “Oh,” said Max. “He belongs to Elisa.”

  Sarah’s eyebrows went up. “Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti?”

  Max nodded.

  “She was at Nela the day you and I met there?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Well, she had just left, actually.”

  Sarah chose her words carefully, while trying to sound ten percent as emotional as she felt.

  “So on the day that Andy was killed, Marchesa Elisa was atÀ Elisa w Nela and could have been responsible for any or all of that and you never felt the need to tell me about her?”

  “It didn’t seem that significant at the time,” said Max, sounding defensive. “My cousin’s not capable of killing anyone . . . unless they stole her front-row seat at a fashion show.”

  “So you know her very well.” Do you know that she’s in Prague right now?

  Max walked over to his office wall, where a large family tree hung. Sarah wondered what it must feel like to see your entire lineage back to the 1400s all charted out. Max pointed to the lower area of the tree.

  “Her grandfather and my grandfather were brothers. Hers was the black sheep of the family. When my grandfather went to England during World War II, her grandfather went to Italy and married an Italian countess.”

  “And she’s a Beethoven expert?”

  “Expert’s a stretch. She’s very good at insinuating herself into any high-level gathering. She collects powerful friends. She has a historic palazzo right on the Grand Canal, and she invites people there constantly—movie stars, politicians, fashion designers. Her profession is to be fabulous.” He said it with scorn, but in a way that Sarah did not find convincing.

  Sarah digested all of it. It almost made sense in a very terrifying way.

  But no.

  Her mind clicked over names, dates, places, details. Old blood. Secrets. Power. Money. And more power. She was not crazy. For the first time since arriving in Prague, Sarah felt maybe she was ahead of the story instead of behind it.

  The marchesa, with her connections in Washington and her fondness for collecting powerful friends, was almost certainly the senator’s eyes and ears—if not gun- and knife-wielding hands—in the palace. She had a bone to pick with the family itself, her grandfather having been cut out of his inheritance in favor of Max’s grandfather. To the marchesa, it must be painfully clear that all this could have been hers. And much of it still could be, if she played her cards right.

  Max did not seem to notice that his cousin had motive, means, and proximity to all the strange goings-on. Sarah couldn’t just do the full Oprah and sit side by side with Max on the couch, starting with, “Honey, I think your cousin is trying to kill us all.” She would have to think this through so as to convince him she hadn’t lost her mind. She would have to prove it to him. And she needed proof about Charlotte Yates’s connection to Yuri Bespalov. Just being in the CIA was not enough. The senator might have the letters, but there might be some other way to prove her involvement. Some trace . . .

  “I want to take the drug again,” said Sarah.

  “There isn’t any more,” said Max, returning to his desk.

  “What do you mean?”

  He opened an ornate music box on his desk, slid back a false bottom, and show

  ed her the secret compartment.

  “I’ve been keeping it here, but someone’s emptied it. Nico, maybe, but he won’t say.”

  “That was it?” she said. “Can’t we get more?”

  “I don’t know,” Max said. “I really don’t.”

  Sarah sunk onto a chair, realizing all the things she would do if she could have one more tiny sliver of the drug that allowed you to see the dead, to watch them going about their lives. She could have moved through time just enough to see Eleanor’s murderer, or Yuri Bespalov’s lover. She could have seen Beethoven.

  Her father . . . if she took the drug to Boston, she could have seen her father again.

  Max sat down next to her on the sofa. It made her uncomfortable, to have him so close. It fucked with her judgment.

  “I found the hidden room,” Max said. “It’s a library. Want to see it?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “It was pretty easy,” Max said, modestly, fanning a sheaf of architectural drawings out acr
oss his desk. “You remember the missing window I found? Well, I just searched around until I found earlier renderings of the palace and compared them with current ones. Here it is.”

  Sarah stood up and joined Max behind his desk. His finger traced rectangular lines and pointed to a tiny line of script in the middle of the rectangle. Max handed Sarah a magnifying glass and she leaned in.

  Library

  “What’s a library doing in the basement?” Sarah asked.

  “Especially when there was already a library aboveground,” Max agreed.

  “So, how do you get to it?” Sarah asked.

  Max covered the older drawing with the current architectural layout.

  “You see,” he explained, “the ‘library’ was sectioned off later into two rooms. This other one was used for storage. And maybe to help conceal the library. Like a kind of decoy. It’s the only other room in the palace without a window.”

  Sarah looked at Max.

  “My room doesn’t have a window,” she said.

  “Bingo. Your room is the threshold into the library.” Max grinned.

  “Great,” Sarah sighed. “So we bulldoze my room tonight? Or do the Lobkowiczes keep a couple of battering rams lying about?”

  Max pulled out another sheaf of drawings and splayed them across the desk.

  “Much simpler,” he explained. “There’s a tunnel below these rooms. Below that whole wing of the palace. I know this because we had to do a major pest control survey and it was recommended that these tunnels get sealed off.” Max blinked up at her. “Rats,” he said. “Rats like you would not believe. Rats the size of dogs.”

  “If you think I am burrowing into a rat-infested tunnel,” Sarah said firmly, “you have truly lost your mind.”

  “The rats are gone,” Max said hƀastily. “I think. Or I hope they’re gone, anyway. We couldn’t use poison. It was actually pretty disgusting. But anyway there are two unsealed exits to the tunnels. You will have to crawl. Or, if you are Nicolas, stoop.”