by Magnus Flyte
Truly she is no [illegible] woman. She is a demon in my veins. Ha, ha I must laugh though to think of the time at N and what fear in the eyes of your servant when we emerged from her arms and [illegible]. I must get a new maid and someone French who understands broth.
Your most obedient servant and true friend,
Beethoven
So it’s not to the Immortal Beloved, Sarah thought. It’s about her. A demon in his veins. A woman that the addressee (which had to be the 7th prince) had apparently shared with Beethoven. Sarah turned to the second letter. This was written in pencil on the back of what looked like a bill from a copyist.
Vôtre Altesse!
I heartily embrace you dear donkey, Fitzliputzli, treasured friend and Doctor. You never open your letters so I feel free to write to you once more. I inquire after your wife, your children, your fortune, and your foot. Would I have that BLOCK to stop all these imbeciles at my door. Nothing but [illegible], and you know it fills me with pain to speak less than gently to any other creature. In this, as in so much else, I am not understood.
I have once again dined with that which we have sometimes called the Immortal Beloved. She is corrupted. You are too timid and too good. I am good but not timid. You [illegible] with her and go back, but I now see that she brings me forward. I go forward and I hear what I have done in the past. Ha, ha! I go forward great leaps, greater this time than ever before. Imagine if you can, a little girl, blind as I am deaf, but what a Hercules. Immortality is strange to look upon. But you should have heard—as I did, my friend, every note!—of my recently completed Sonata in F Minor. I was plunged into happiness such as I have never felt. But for this I must make payment, as always. A fall in my health, my spirits, the emptiness we have spoken of before. But for a few minutes—such joy. Such joy, my friend.
In loving haste and esteem,
L. v. B.
Sarah’s hands were shaking. Pols. Pols had played the Sonata in F minor at the competition. Played, as she had said, as if Beethoven were there instructing her. The Immortal Beloved was not a woman. It was the drug. And Beethoven was moving with it, moving forward through time to hear his completed works.
When he had looked at Sarah that night and said “Immortal Beloved,” he wasn’t naming her, he was naming the drug that was revealing her to him.
Sarah tried to imagine how she could possibly explain any of this. Who would believe her? It was unbelievable. Unless you h Unless ad taken the drug yourself, seen what it could do. What could it do? And how?
She turned to the third letter. It looked older than the other two, and unlike them was dated: July 3. Sarah smoothed the creases and folds out as best she could with the tips of her T-shirt-covered fingers.
My friend—
Only a few words and those in haste. I leave tomorrow. Rest your mind. I will write to A when I arrive. She heard a little, but understood NOTHING. How could she? You saw how it is between us. To [illegible] at my age—when I need a quiet, steady life, it is impossible. God give me the courage to end it. And yet how can I? To give to her what I can only give to my work? My mind is in pieces. I see them all, all at once. We must never indulge ourselves again. Destroy what you have left of it. I am suffering. But your secret is safe. I will write to A.
BEETHOVEN
Sarah put down the letter, thinking hard. On July 2 Beethoven had been in Prague. On July 4 he had taken a coach to the spa in Teplitz and on the sixth and seventh of that month he had penned the Immortal Beloved letters, almost irrefutably to Antonie Brentano. In fact, there were phrases in that letter that echoed this one: “only a few words . . . ,” “at my age I need a steady, quiet life.” The letter of July 6 began with “You are suffering.”
She heard a little, but understood NOTHING.
• • •
A sequence of events formed in her brain. Antonie Brentano had interrupted Ludwig and Prince Lobkowicz talking about the drug, or maybe even in the midst of a drug-induced trip. Luigi had then hotfooted it to Teplitz, possibly to avoid a scene or to give himself time to think of an explanation. There he had penned the letters that effectively ended the affair with Brentano. Sarah thought through those letters. Despite their protestations of ardor and faithfulness, she had never really believed in the sincerity of Ludwig’s sentiments.
Much as you love me—I love you more—But do not conceal yourself from me—good night—As I am taking the baths I must go to bed—Oh God! So near! So far!
Sarah had snorted when she had first read that sentence. I love you but I need to get some sleep because I have a spa appointment tomorrow!
But of course it was possible to be incredibly in love with someone and still think about ordinary things. Especially if you were ill and a genius and your girlfriend was married with four children and you had avoided getting married yourself all your life so you had time to compose the greatest music of the age and be gaseous without apology.
Sarah looked down at the letters spread across the desk. She tried reading through them as if she didn’t know anything about the drug, as if she were any other musicologist. Without knowing about Tycho’s secret formula, you could almost imagine that the “secret” was some sort of illicit sexual connection between Beethoven and his patron. That they had been sharing women or men, or Antonie, or having some sort of kink sort ofy three-way. That Antonie had caught them doing the nasty at the palace in Prague, and Ludwig was doing damage control with the Immortal Beloved letters.
Even what she felt su
re was a reference to Pols—a child blind as I am deaf—could be about someone in Beethoven’s own time—a pupil. Or a gifted prostitute.
There would be a firestorm of speculation.
A loud slam interrupted her speculations. Sarah jumped, her heart thundering. She grabbed the candelabra and turned.
The trapdoor was shut. As she moved toward it, she heard a distinct click, and something—or someone—moving in the tunnel below.
“Max?” she called cautiously. There was no sound. She set the candelabra on the floor and reached down to lift the trapdoor. It wouldn’t budge.
She pulled on the door, shouting. She looked up, helplessly, for something to aid her, a tool, a wedge. She held up the candles and looked at the opposite corner of the room, which she hadn’t inspected.
Perhaps this explained the 1982 penny she had picked up.
A skeleton cowered in the corner, curled in a fetal position, a pair of red wedge-heeled espadrilles still tied to the feet bones.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Sarah approached the skeleton cautiously. Whatever—whoever—this had been in life, the body was now thoroughly decomposed. The bones were not the pristine white of school science labs and doctors’ offices, however. They were mottled gray and there was something . . . wrong about the angle of the neck. Fabric was twined around the neck bones. Crudely knotted, it fell in a coil around the espadrilles. Sarah glanced up at the ceiling, which was crisscrossed with a latticework of wooden beams.
She stepped back, re-creating the situation in her mind. A woman trapped in this library, in 1982 at the earliest. Accidentally? Imprisoned? How long had she survived before she had decided to take her own life? Shredding her own clothing, apparently, to make herself a noose.
Sarah shuddered. Too late to help the poor woman now. Still shirtless and shivering, she set to work on moving the trapdoor. After thirty minutes, her hands were bruised and welted and the door hadn’t moved an inch.
She crawled on her hands and knees across the floor of the library, her fingers searching for a crack, a loose board, something.
Nothing.
Sarah knew that beyond one of the four walls was her own bedroom in the palace, but her twisting journey through the tunnels had displaced her normally keen sense of direction. Which wall? All of them were covered with built-in bookcases. And surely if there had been another way out, then the woman who had been trapped here before . . .
Sarah looked at the pathetic crumble of bo
nes in the corner.
Now felt like a good time to completely fall apart. No one would blame her if she panicked, screamed, started crying.
Sarah shivered. She was freezing. She went to the desk and picked up the cloak folded over the chair. The fabric was soft against her skin as she pulled it around her shoulders. Her sensitive nose twitched. There was an odor, but not of death or decay. Something rich, strange, almost sensual. Resinous. Musky. She couldn’t identify it.
The library seemed to move in and out of focus and her eyes were heavy. Was she falling asleep? She had read about situations of extreme stress sometimes causing drowsiness, the body’s fight to escape the circumstances it found itself in.
Was that music? Real or imagined? Sarah started humming along.
The Diabelli Variations.
In 1819 a music publisher by the name of Anton Diabelli had composed a thirty-two-bar waltz in C major for piano and then invited fifty Viennese composers to create a variation for it. Ludwig at that time was embroiled in an epic court battle with his despised sister-in-law over the custody of his nephew Karl. His health was deplorable, his domestic situation a shambles (every other week a cook or maid departed weeping from a ramshackle series of apartments), and by all accounts he was pretty thoroughly depressed and possibly delusional. Still he managed by 1820 to have composed not just one variation on Diabelli’s theme, but an astonishing twenty-two. By 1823 he handed over the final variations: thirty-three in number, a personal best for Luigi, and, perhaps not coincidentally, one more than Bach in his Goldberg Variations.
Sarah kept humming. At number 8 she felt herself dancing a little, swirling the cloak around her as she waltzed. She felt her courage grow around number 14 (Grave e maestoso!) and her sense of humor (Presto! Scherzando!) returned in number 15. By the time she hit variation 22, she was feeling almost high. In the Diabelli Variations nothing is sacred and nothing is unworthy of consideration. It is Beethoven in all his late-period glory. All risks, all invention, all extremes. Ludwig didn’t revolt or rebel against the conventions of his time, the musical forms of his day. He set them on fire and sailed right through them to the other side.
By the time the variations came to an end she was shouting, singing the notes with a hysterical vigor and jumping up and down. She was warm now. Her skin prickled with heat.
She glanced over at the skeleton. She couldn’t die here. She was going to set the world on fire with . . .
Sarah heard something below her, almost under her feet. A clanking, scraping noise, and then a banging. She moved quickly over to the trapdoor. Yes, someone was coming. She rushed back to the desk to conceal the Beethoven letters. They should be hidden. But she couldn’t see them. Where were they? The newspaper, too, was gone.
The pounding stopped, and the trapdoor began to creep open.
“Hallo?” said a voice from the darkness below. Male. Czech? American? Sarah crouched, ready.
“Ist da jemand?” German. Is anyone there? he was asking.
Sarah steadied her breathing as two gloved hands appeared, then the top of a hat. A flat tan military hat. Was she being rescued by the police?
The man hoisted himself up through the trapdoor. He was wearing a uniform: short belted jaort beltcket and boots. As he stood up to his full length, she saw he was a tall man, well-built. He looked around, and as he turned to face her, she gasped in shock. There was a swastika on his uniform.
The man stared at her for a moment, then a snarl formed on his face as he put his hands up.
“The Führer will be very angry that you tried to hide these things from him,” he said in German, still staring at her. “Very angry indeed.”
Sarah picked up the candelabra.
“Don’t come near me,” she said.
In an instant a gun was in his hand. As Sarah heard it fire, she shut her eyes and swung the candelabra like a baseball bat, with all her strength.
She expected to feel the impact of the candelabra against his head, but with a sinking sensation instead felt it swing around, hitting nothing. She staggered.
The Nazi fell to the floor, dead. Dead?
As she stared down at him, watching a crimson stain spread over his jacket, blood spurting from a small hole, his eyes open and glassy, she felt something hot and electric pulse through her body. Had she been shot?
There was a second man in the room now. He had come from behind her. He had come through her. The man stared into the face of the dead Nazi.
Sarah leapt away from them, nearly tripping over her cloak. “What the hell?!” she shouted.
The man did not seem to hear her. He leaned over the Nazi, a strange and ornate antique gun in his hand with mother-of-pearl inlays.
Sarah shrank backward against a bookcase.
The man sighed. He was tall and thin, wearing a beautifully tailored gray flannel suit. He pulled a perfect square of white handkerchief from his pocket.
“Max?” Sarah said. But this man was older than Max. And slightly different-looking, but just slightly. The same hawklike nose, high forehead.
Max’s grandfather.
She reached out a hand and put it on his arm. He took no notice of this and her hand went right through his body, though she felt a stabbing hotness in her fingers.
Sarah nudged the dead Nazi’s leg, and her foot met nothing but air, though her toes crackled with electricity.
The drug. It had to be the drug. But she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since arriving in the secret library. How else could the drug enter her system? Was she breathing it? The musky, resinous, scent she had noticed earlier? Like amber . . . Was the room itself saturated with the drug?
She watched Max study the dead Nazi, breathing heavily. His form began to fade and flicker as he began quickly stripping the uniform off the soldier.
A sense of vertigo overwhelmed her. Objects in the room began to shift, brighten, and darken. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye, and saw another woman, very much alive, sitting at the desk, looking at the contents of the briefcase. Wearing red espadrilles. The color was so vivid, the woman so sharply delineated, that it hurt her eyes.urt her
“I can’t believe it,” the woman said.
She was dressed in the same dress the skeleton wore, but with the fabric intact. Sarah struggled to focus; she could smell the woman’s hair, her shampoo, her perfume, her breath. The woman smiled excitedly over her shoulder at someone, and Sarah turned to see the faint outlines of a young man examining the contents of the bookcase. He was humming Diabelli Variation number 7.
“Me either,” said the ghostly young man. “This stuff is amazing—a real treasure trove.” Sarah could now make out his suit: shiny gray with wide lapels, dusty on the shoulders and damp at the cuffs.
At her feet, Max’s grandfather returned. He had stripped the Nazi soldier of his uniform. “God forgive me,” he said.
“No, look at this,” cried the young woman in the red espadrilles. “Memos and cables and letters to and from John Paisley. Do you realize what this is? These are records about Paisley’s involvement with the KGB. And records of the KGB’s involvement . . .” The woman looked up; her eyes were huge. “The KGB’s assassination of President Kennedy.” Her eyes glowed.
“This is coming with us,” she said, picking it up. “This is going to make my career.”
Sarah shuddered a little. She recognized herself in this woman. The ambition. It was so naked, her need. To prove herself. To prove to all of them.
“What if we get caught?” the young man was asking. “You know they search our luggage every time we leave the hotel. I don’t want to end up in jail behind the Iron Curtain. Look, stay here. I’m going to get Joseph.”
It’s not safe, Sarah thought. Wait, stop.
Max was lowering the body of the dead Nazi down into the tunnel. A woman’s voice called up to him. “I’m frightened,” she said. She was English.
“Quickly,” said Max. “We will drag him down to the inflow for the moat.”
“They will know you did this—” the woman started to say.
“We need to leave now,” said Max. “Or they will kill us. But the library will be safe. Someday this war will be over and we will come back.”
Suddenly a wail went up from the other side of the room. Sarah turned to see the young woman standing with her hands against the wall.
“No no no no!” she was screaming. “Let me out! Stop it!”
Sarah could now hear terrible screams coming from the other side of the rock wall. A man—screaming in pain. Being tortured, it sounded like. It was unbearable.
The woman was pounding on the wall and crying. She tried the trapdoor again, but it was locked from the outside.
“Please!” the young woman cried. “Don’t hurt him. We’ll never tell anyone we were here. Please let us go.”
More screaming. The woman sat down on the floor and sobbed. She put her hands over her ears, but couldn’t stop the sound of the young man’s screams.
The eon Pro">vents of the room began to skid, looping back on themselves, then jumping forward. Max shot the Nazi, the woman hanged herself from the beam. Max hauled in boxes, books. He put a cigarette case in his pocket. Someone new appeared in the room. He barely glanced around the library. In his hand was the briefcase.
