by Magnus Flyte
“You sent Nico into the tunnel?” Sarah couldn’t help laughing. “Well, I guess he does have training from the summer with the Siberian acrobats. If the man can wiggle into my T-shirt while tied to my bed, he can manage a simple tunnel.”
“That was my thought exactly,” said Max, grinning. “Apparently there are a couple of breaks in the ceiling of the tunnel, with ladders leading upward. Trapdoors in the floors of the rooms above. You remember that your room was once part of the dungeon?”
Sarah shivered. She wasn’t likely to forget. A wave of nausea passed through her. The smell of vomit, of shit, of fear. The screaming.
“Nico made a map of where the ladders are.”
Max took a piece of transparent paper and smoothed it over the architectural rendering.
“Right here. Right under where the library is, or was, is a trapdoor,” Max said, triumphantly.
“Which Nico went into?” Sarah asked, taking a deep breath and replacing the horrid smell of the dungeons with the smell of Max’s skin. Sarah resisted the impulse to bury her face in his neck.
“It’s locked,” Max said.
“Of course it’s locked,” Sarah snorted impatiently. “It can’t be that easy. Everything here is locked, or chained, or walled-up, or impaled or stabbed or pushed out of a window.” For a moment she felt like crying. Poor Eleanor. Poor Sherbatsky. No. She didn’t need to cry over Eleanor. Or her beloved professor. Or Stefania, the shuffling prematurely aged dancer who had rescued her from the roof. Or the various pawns who had been used and discarded by agents of greed and power through the years. Tears wouldn’t help them. Sarah searched around for a word that would restore her to herself. Justice? Not quite powerful enough. Vengeance? Yeah, that was pretty good. But Sarah knew that deep down the thing that was driving her had nothing to do with exposing Charlotte Yates, or solving the murders, suicides, or disappearances of a rising number or people. No, it was the sense that at the end of all these dark turnings and twists there was an answer waiting for her about something else entirely. Something that Pols would understand. And maybe, if she trusted him, Max, too.
Beethoven.
“Don’t look so sad,” Max said, breaking into her thoughts. “Nico said the lock is old and he thinks it wouldn’t take much to break it at this point. There might be something above the trapdoor, though. A piece of furniture, a bookcase. It’s definitely going to be a two-person job.”
“Nico’s probably breaking in as we speak,” Sarah said. Max shook his head.
“He’s on assignment.”
“Assignment?” Sarah raised an eyebrow.
“I have him keeping watch on the hotel where your little friend is staying,” Max said simply. “He’ll stay with her until she’s safely on a flight out of Prague. Too many bad things have been happening lately. Nico understands what’s at stake. He won’t let anything happen to her.”
This touched Sarah so deeply that she felt like it was time to come clean.
“There might be . . .” Sarah hesitated. “There might be more at stake than you realize.”
Max looked at her gravely, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms, looking so much like the photograph of his grandfather Max above him that it was as if the picture had slipped out of its frame. They wore the exact same inscrutable expression.
Men with secrets, Sarah thought.
“So tonight?” she said, hedging. “Tonight we break into a secret library?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Max corrected. “Nine a.m., when the construction crew gets started and there’ll be a lot of noise.”
“And in the meantime?”
Max waved a book at her. “I’ve got some reading to do. This one’s about your favorite Lobkowicz: the 7th.”
“When I . . . when I was on the drug. I saw him,” Sarah said. “I saw his face. I heard him speak.”
“I’ve seen him, too,” Max said, quietly, shutting the book. “I went hunting with him, actually.”
“I think you need to tell me about the drug,” Sarah said. She looked across the room to where Max was standing. It was too dark to see his face, but she could sense him frowning, thinking.
“When my grandfather left Prague in 1948, he had nothing but the clothes on his back,” Max said. “That’s the official story, and it’s true, as far as I know, but he wasn’t absolutely destitute. Grandfather Max was a patriot, but he wasn’t a fool. There were some investments, friends, connections. Still, can you imagine? Having to leave behind a family fortune and collection that was begun in 1592. Abandon everything, totally, with no hope of ever getting it back?”
“I can’t imagine it,” Sarah said, honestly.
“Yeah, well, I think I’m only just beginning to,” Max sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe he felt sort of relieved, in a way. It’s a lot of responsibility. I can’t even throw away an old moth-eaten pillow because maybe it once propped up the 6th Princess Lobkowicz’s head or some damned thing. Maybe it was woven by a master of the lost needlepoint style that some academic will jizz over and I need to build a special temperature sensitive display case for it.”
“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” said Sarah. Max laughed softly.
“Anyway, Grandfather Max left Prague with two things. His hat and a cigarette case in his pocket.”
“Is that the same cigarette case you have?” Sarah asked. “With the weird symbol on it?”
“When my dad died the lawyers gave it to me,” Max said quietly. “Said my father was supposed to give it to me when I turned twenty-one. My mother’s instructions. But he hadn’t. He basically considered me to be a huge fuck-up. The end of the Lobkowicz line. A total disappointment to my mother’s memory. And look what’s been happening around here. I’m probably the laughingstock of Prague.”
Sarah cˀ Pro">Saouldn’t help it. It wasn’t her style, but she reached out and found Max’s hand. He laced his fingers into hers.
“Anyway, now I have the cigarette case. Grandpa Max’s prized possession. He didn’t smoke,” Max continued. “Apparently he just carried the empty case around. Only it wasn’t empty. There was an envelope inside.”
Sarah found herself holding her breath, waiting.
“Toenail clippings.” Max laughed. “Fucking toenail clippings. I almost threw them out. But I don’t know. Something made me . . . anyway, that’s where the whole thing started.”
“Where what started?” Sarah asked. “I don’t get it.”
“Sherbatsky,” Max said. “He wrote to me and asked if he could come and look at the musical collection. Of course, his credentials were impeccable. He was clearly the best man for the job. He’d been here for a few weeks and then one day he came into my office and showed me a letter he’d found. From Ludwig van Beethoven to Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz. There’s the usual money talk and complaints. And then a reference to his toenails.”
“His toenails?”
“The infernal tricks of my body have subsided, for the moment. But strangely I find that the nails of fingers and toes grow apace. Can this be an effect of the elixir that we shall not name? I confess it frightens me. I send you some examples, which my servant with her usual clumsiness has severed from my person,” Max quoted.
“Are you serious?” Sarah sat up.
“Well, that was the gist of it anyway,” Max answered. “And I laughed and said, ‘Oh, maybe that’s what the toenails were. Grandfather Max left Prague with his hat and Ludwig van Beethoven’s toenails.’”
“But . . .” Sarah sputtered. “Wouldn’t they . . . be, like, totally decomposed by now? Or biodegraded or whatever?”
“Yup,” Max said. “Toenails are keratin. I looked it up. They shouldn’t . . . I mean it’s strictly impossible. Unless whatever elixir Beethoven was taking had something in it that altered their molecular structure.”
“So you’re telling me the pill I swallowed shaped like a toenail . . . ?”
“Was actually one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s toenails?” Max said. “U
m. Yeah.”
Sarah, for the first time in her life, felt herself utterly and completely at a loss for words.
“It was Sherbatsky’s idea,” Max went on, hurriedly. “After I told him about the cigarette case, and the whole story, he went kind of ape-shit. Said he had been tracing all these mysterious references between LVB and the 7th prince to some kind of drug. Something the prince had given him and that Sherbatsky thought had affected Beethoven’s hearing.”
Sarah thought back to the strange vision she had experienced. What was it that Prince Lobkowicz had asked Beethoven?
“Is it working?” the prince had asked. “Can you hear me?”
“But the drug makes us move through time,ˀthrough ” Sarah argued. “And Beethoven wasn’t moving through time. I saw him take the drug, or some kind of drug. I got the impression that it made him hear.”
“Heightened perception.” Max nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. But we weren’t taking the pure drug. We were taking, you know, toenails of someone who took the drug a couple hundred years ago. It was polluted. And we’re not moving through time, you know. We’re just seeing things. It’s hard to know if it’s all real.”
There had been something else. Something the 7th prince had said to Beethoven after Beethoven took the pill. What was it?
“A toast to Brahe.” Yes, that was it.
Tycho Brahe. The astronomer who had served at the court of Rudolf II. Tycho Brahe, who was, among other things, an alchemist.
“I thought it was totally ridiculous.” Max was still talking. “But we did a bunch of research. First we found out the symbol on the case was some kind of alchemical thing, and Sherbatsky convinced me that there really might have been something going on. I suggested we send the toenails off to a lab, to be tested. I gave the job to Nico. Who evidently decided to keep one and pass it on to you. God knows why.”
“So what did the lab results come back with?” Sarah realized that although Max was speaking calmly, he was gripping her hand very hard. Or was it hers that was clutching his?
“It was . . . strange,” Max said. “Traces of keratin, like you might expect, but a whole bunch of other things. Silver. Myrrh. Elk bone, if you can believe it. And things they couldn’t really identify. ‘Might be this, might be that.’ ‘Very similar to.’ ‘The presence of this is quite surprising.’ That kind of thing. Believe me, the last thing I thought of was to actually ingest a toenail. That was all Sherbatsky. He had talked to some neuroscientist who pointed out that certain chemicals can’t be flushed from the body: They just settle into the cells. Sherbatsky had all these theories about glial cells, too, and perception. And when he told me what had happened when he took one of the things . . . the visions that he had . . . well, I decided to try it for myself.”
“That’s what you were doing at Nelahozeves with Sherbatsky,” Sarah said. “Douglas told me that he thought you and Professor Sherbatsky were doing drugs.”
“Well, he wasn’t wrong,” Max said. “We thought it safer to experiment there, at first. I didn’t want Absalom tripping here at the palace. And also . . . I had reasons of my own for wanting to be at Nela. My mother was born there, actually.”
“That’s what you were hoping to see, wasn’t it,” Sarah said. “Sherbatsky was trying to find Beethoven, but you were looking for your mother.”
“I’ve seen photographs of her there,” Max said. “She died when I was so little. I just wanted to see . . . her face, I guess.”
Sarah nodded. She knew what that felt like.
“But I never did see her,” Max said. “I saw the 7th prince a lot. Some other things. Strange things. And then Sherbatsky wasn’t satisfied, he wanted to do the drug here, where Beethoven had been more often. I think that’s what happened. He was tripping, wandering around the palace, but noˀalace, bt the palace as it is now. There have been changes. There used to be a little gallery that connected one wing to the other. It’s not there now. And that’s how the accident happened.”
“And so Professor Sherbatsky thought he was crossing a bridge,” Sarah said, “and stepped out of a window instead.” For a moment, grief overwhelmed her. She looked up at Max, and saw that he was grieving, too.
At least now she understood. There was some kind of closure. Sherbatsky was not murdered, had not committed suicide. His death had been an accident.
“There wasn’t
much left of the . . . toenail, drug, whatever, at that point,” Max said, after a long moment. “And now it’s all gone. Maybe it’s for the best.”
“What about the report that the lab sent?” Sarah asked. “Do you think that whatever was in Beethoven’s toenails could be . . . re-created?”
“Not from the lab test,” Max said. “There’re too many unknown variables. But I can’t help thinking that somewhere . . . a formula exists. Written down somewhere. Hidden. I don’t know.”
“In a walled-off library?” Sarah asked, trying not to sound too eager.
“We don’t have a lot of time to get our sleuthing in,” Max said. “This place is going to be crawling with Secret Service in two weeks.”
“Secret Service?” Sarah froze.
“For the opening of the Palace Collections on the fifteenth,” Max explained. “The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is coming. Charlotte Yates.”
THIRTY-FIVE
As soon as she was awake, Sarah called Jose. He told her they were stopping by the Church of Our Lady Victorious on their way to the airport. Sarah was relieved to hear Nico was with them. With Marchesa Elisa lurking in Prague, having already been in the same room with Pols, they couldn’t be too careful.
She checked her watch. Plenty of time before the planned hidden library hunt. She raced out the back entrance of the castle complex and down the steps into Malá Strana.
Outside the church, she spotted Nico standing sentry by a small door, smoking a cigarette.
“Thank you for watching over her,” said Sarah. Nico nodded.
“I don’t like to go inside holy houses before noon,” the little man said. “It upsets my stomach. But they are safe in there. My friend Sister Teresa is giving the hundred-crown tour.”
Sarah stepped inside the narrow door and followed the sound of a woman’s voice, clear and bell-like in the otherwise silent church. “In 1631, the monastery in Munich was destroyed and the Miraculous Infant was thrown on a trash heap where it lay forgotten for seven years . . .”
The church was decorated with typically nauseating baroque excess. The altar dedicated to the Baby Jesus was especially tricked out: gold, flowers, candles, and a special glass case for the Infant doll. It had on a snazzy blue number. Daphne had informed them all that the Carmelite nuns had a sixty-outfit wardrobe for the little guy, including a wee undershirt so the Nuns couldn’t see His naughty bits when they changed His clothes.
Pols was standing with her head bent, praying. Then she handed the nun an envelope and stood back as Jose crossed himself reverently at the altar.
“Pols,” Sarah said, softly.
The girl reached a hand forward and Sarah took it. They began walking up the nave. The nun, who had evidently opened the envelope and seen what Sarah was sure was a very large check, followed them murmuring thanks and blessings.
“It’s not him,” Pollina whispered to Sarah.
“What do you mean?” asked Sarah.
“That’s not the real Infant.”
Sarah blinked. “How do you know?”
Pols looked impatient. “I just know.”
On the street, Sarah lingered. Pollina often resisted hugs, or physical contact, but this time she allowed Sarah to put her arms around her, gently.
“I’ll pray for you,” said Pols.
“Thank you,” said Sarah, wondering what the rules were when the pure of heart prayed for the nonpure. Suddenly the girl gripped her tightly. Sarah was surprised at the strength in her thin arms.
“And stay close to Max,” the little girl whispered.
As
the car pulled away and she looked back up at the castle, there was a distant rumble of thunder. Nicely done, thought Sarah. Very theatrical. She looked at her watch, and started walking quickly up the hill.
Pollina’s last words were cryptic. Did she mean stay close to Max, because Max would help and protect her? Or watch him closely because he was dangerous?
Should she come clean to him about her knowledge of Charlotte Yates? After all, the woman was coming. HERE. Why? The letters were now presumably in her possession. Her secrets were safe. Was it a return to the scene of the crime thing? Gloating? What was to be gained by Charlotte returning to the place of her youthful love affair with a KGB agent?
Should she tell Max about her suspicions of Marchesa Elisa?
Jana met her as she marched down the hall headed for the breakfast room. “Prince Max was called away suddenly,” she said. “He sends his apologies and asks you to please wait for him before moving forward.”
Sarah tried not to look as disappointed as she felt. “Of course,” said Sarah. “Thank you. Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“He didn’t say,” said Jana. “But since he flew to Venice, I expect it will be a few days at least.”
Flew to Venice? Sarah wanted to shout at Jana. “Did he . . . go alone?” she asked instead, trying to be cautious.
“I believe he accompanied his cousin the marchesa,” said Jana.
Sarah nodded, feeling suddenly sick. Ӏddenly sThe last thing she wanted was breakfast, but she needed information, so she pushed open the door of the kitchen.
She was surprised to see that Miles was back. She tried to keep her voice from betraying anything as she inquired politely after his “family emergency.”
“Is the Beethoven exhibit ready to be installed?” Miles asked.
“Very close,” said Sarah. “I’m working on the text for the catalog now.”
“You missed meeting Marchesa Elisa,” said Suzi. “She had breakfast with us. In head-to-toe Gucci. They’re off to Venice to retrieve a Canova. Something urgent about an old lady on her deathbed. She got the statue during the war from a Nazi and now she wants to make it right.”
