City of Dark Magic

by Magnus Flyte

  She walked back upstairs and waded back into the party. Marchesa Elisa was standing now with Max in a corner of the Balcony Room. Max looked exhausted.

  “How was Venice?” she asked loudly, waving her cell in her hand. “I’m sorry I’m late. I was checking up on Bernie, poor lamb chop. Great party, huh? If music be the food of love, play on.” The marchesa dropped her glass of champagne, which was made much less dramatic by the fact it was made of plastic.

  “Venice was disappointing,” said Max. “The Canova was a copy. But I picked up this.” He put a long-nosed Pulcinello mask up to his face and Sarah laughed out loud, watching the marchesa out of the corner of her eye, who was frantically scanning the room for Bernard, or rather Maria Manrique de Lara, no doubt preparing to give him hell.

  “What on earth are we listening to?” asked Max, as a remixLared Hallelujah chorus boomed through the room, stuttering “Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-ha-ha-ha . . . ,” which was Sarah’s exact thought as the marchesa strode out of the room.

  “Max,” said Sarah, grabbing his arm. “I have to talk to you.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.

  For some reason, Charlotte Yates couldn’t get Macbeth out of her head. She wished, as she sometimes did when she allowed herself a moment of self-pity, that she had someone she could swap quotations of the Bard with. Or even just show off her own acute memory skills, acquired from mastering an ancient Greek memory retrieval system during her lonely adolescence. But it was dangerous to let anyone know how good her memory was. One always needed to retain the right to credibly say “I don’t remember” when questioned, and it was hard to get away with that when people knew you could recite half the First Folio by heart.

  Stars, hide your fires;

  Let not light see my black and deep desires.

  The senator looked around her office. She hadn’t bothered to redecorate when she moved in. Not that she didn’t have strong ideas about décor, but you didn’t put time and money into rentals, and that’s what this office was. Just a little pied-à-terre. Once in the Oval, she would assert her taste in a more permanent way. She’d definitely return that ghastly bust of Churchill to the Smithsonian or wherever it came from. Had anyone done something attractive with Margaret Thatcher’s head?

  Thinking of the Smithsonian made Charlotte think of Miles Wolfmann. She had intimated that the directorship of the museum was his in return for a certain amount of discretion, and the sooner she got him installed there, the better. A favor extended, but not yet taken, could easily be mistaken for a bribe. But of course she wasn’t actually bribing Miles. Charlotte Yates didn’t offer bribes, or take them. She simply believed in free markets. That was American!

  At least Miles’s decision to grow testicles had come late enough that she had secured her letters. The letters were hers.

  But too many mistakes had been made. This is how it always went, when you left things in the hands of amateurs. Mistakes got made, and then you made mistakes covering up other mistakes. Then somebody had to get killed. Or you needed to start a war, just because it was too much bother to try to unravel all the little mistakes and make amends and apologies and make sure everyone felt good about themselves, or whatever.

  We have scorched the snake, not killed it.

  It should have all gone quite smoothly. Making Max look unstable turned out to be something Max did very well on his own. That the Russians had shown up and planted a spy in the form of Andy Blackman had made the game more intrigui

  ng, in a way. She would have admired the marchesa’s skill in framing Andy’s death on her cousin and the indefatigable Weston chippy, but like most of the plans Elisa had made, it had gone badly. Furthermore, she had enlisted (again, witndy’hout consulting her!) this doleful Bernard creature to be her minion and had blackmailed him with promises of snuffboxes, then made a theatrical mess of the thing.

  And it had been a jolt, learning that the blind kid who had been skulking about the Internet looking for dirt on her was the pupil of the Sarah Weston person. And someone at an Internet café near Prague Castle had done a similar search. Sarah Weston was becoming a serious pest.

  Perhaps it was time for something clean and definitive. Well, soon enough she would have her boots on the ground. The opening of the museum. She had been planning on taking a lovely stroll through the scenes of her halcyon youth. Darling Yuri. So many secrets. So many memories. But now she had all these mistakes to clean up. Things that were absolutely not her fault!

  There had to be some simple solution. Was there anything, or anybody left in that museum worth saving? Maybe it was time to really wipe the slate clean and give herself a fresh start. It was something to think about.

  Hell is murky.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Sarah stared in dismay at the empty room.

  They had crawled through the tunnels and pushed open the hatch, this time armed with a giant battery-powered lantern. The room was bare of every last trace of the objects that had been stored there for seventy years. Nothing remained but cobwebs.

  Max came up through the hatch and looked around, confused.

  “You wanted to show me an empty wine cellar?”

  Sarah shone her light all over the walls and floor. There was really nothing left.

  “This room was full of things,” she said, her mind going a million miles an hour. “Secret things. Nico saw it. And Bernard.”

  Sarah had not told Max what had happened yet. She had only said, “I have something to show you.” She had been planning on telling him everything once they were here.

  “Where is Nico?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see him at the party tonight.”

  “And Bernard’s—where?”

  “At the hospital.” Sarah’s heart had begun to pound. Could Bernard have regained consciousness, and double-crossed them? Called the marchesa and arranged for the room to be emptied right under their noses? But, no, the marchesa would never have compromised herself, and she had been genuinely shocked to see Sarah. So that left—

  “How well do you actually know Nicolas?” Sarah asked.

  “He’s always been around,” Max said, vaguely, running his hands over the empty shelves and walls as if they might contain clues. “My whole life. After my father died he came with me to Prague.”

  Sarah thought for a moment. Bernard could have killed her at any time and didn’t. Nico had appeared at precisely the right moment to save her. Nico had hit Bernard and knocked him out,at left but what if he had only “hit” him? Was the goose egg on his head even real? What if the two of them had been in league all along, and had staged the murder attempt to scare her into getting out of there? What if Bernie and Nico were now a thousand miles away, with a truckload of treasure?

  “Damn it,” Max said. “What are we going to do?”

  What could they do? They couldn’t go to the police with stories of treasure that showed up in no catalog. It would be like reporting a missing unicorn.

  And Sarah was pretty certain that if they went to the hospital, there would be no record of Bernard there. She shone her light around the room again in desperation. And then aimed it at the ceiling.

  “Oh, come ON,” she said, pointing. There was something written on a wooden beam. “How the hell does he do that?”

  “You think Nico left it?” Max said, peering upward.

  “It’s kind of a trademark move,” Sarah said. “He must have known I would check. Hoist me up?”

  Max made a bridge of his hands and Sarah kicked off her shoe. Max lifted, and Sarah read the minute handwriting.

  Only one who knows longing

  Knows what I suffer!—Op. 83

  “Fucking Nico.” Max brought her down. “What’s Op. 83?”

  “He’s referring to Beethoven’s Opus 83,” Sarah said. “A song cycle LVB did to some poems by Goethe.”

  “Beethoven wrote songs?”

  “He wrote the music for songs, sure,” Sarah
said. “He wrote the music to ‘Elegy on the Death of a Poodle.’ For real. It’s very sad.”

  “It might not have been Nico. That could have been there forever. It could have nothing to do with this.” Max paced around the little room, getting angrier and more frustrated by the minute. “He’s the one Elisa warned me about, you know. Not you, Nico.”

  Elisa. Sarah needed to tell him about Elisa.

  “What did she say?” Sarah asked.

  “She told me he was very dangerous and that I was a fool to give him the run of the place. I knew he was a thief, but I trusted him. Goddammit, he was supposed to be helping me.” Max looked ready to fall apart.

  “He can’t have taken it far,” said Sarah, desperately hoping this was true. “I mean, it’s not like you can stuff an entire room of historical curiosities into your carry-on and board a flight to Rio, can you? At the very least they’d stop you for the golem dust.”

  Max didn’t say anything.

  “He moved it, Max. To keep it safe. The poem is a clue to where.” She told herself this must be true. She couldn’t have been so duped. Could she?

  “What’s the poem again?”

  Sarah recited:

  Alone and cut off

  From all joy,

  I look into the firmament

  In that direction.

  Ach! he who loves and knows me

  Is far away.

  I am reeling,

  My entrails are burning.

  Only one who knows longing

  Knows what I suffer!

  “ ‘My entrails are burning’ sounds better in German,” Sarah said. “Well, slightly better.”

  “Speaking of entrails, let’s get out of here,” Max said. “Smells like something died in here.”

  You have no idea, thought Sarah.

  • • •

  There was something about walking and talking. Sarah had always felt that it was easier to unspool a long story while striding side by side rather than staring face-to-face, or even sitting across a table with a glass of wine. It was as if the action of moving one’s legs released the words in a steady rhythm, sentence building upon sentence until the tale was told. And the lack of eye contact helped you through the rough bits.

  Max and Sarah left the palace, walked through the eastern gate at the end of Jirská Street, down the steep steps to the Malostranská tram stop, and through the streets of the darkened city.

  Nico had not answered his cell phone. There was nothing to do but wait.

  It was time to trust Max.

  As they wove their way through Malá Strana, across Charles Bridge, through Old Town, the Old Jewish Quarter, up Paris Street, through Old Town Square, and on into Wenceslas Square, Sarah told Max everything that had happened. Her suspicions that Charlotte Yates was the author of those letters to Yuri Bespalov. How Pols discovered Marchesa Elisa’s connection to Charlotte. She told him about going into the tunnels, about nearly drowning when they flooded. The discovery of the library, the briefcase with KGB secrets, Tycho Brahe’s journal, the Immortal Beloved letters, and the cloak. For some reason, that brought Max up short more than anything else.

  “Describe the cloak,” Max said, intently. She did so.

  Sarah described the bad trip she’d taken on the corrupted drug when she put on the saturated cape. How at first it had all seemed like the past: She had seen his grandfather killing the Nazi soldier, the young couple from the 1970s, the Russian man (Yuri Bespalov, surely) who had left the briefcase and taken the Aztec amulet.

  “Then it got a little hairy.” Sarah didn’t tell him all of the terrifying things she had seen on the drug, except to say that “basically it makes your worst fears come alive.”

  She told him how Bernard pulled a gun on her. “Max, you need to know this. He said it was Elisa who killed Eleanor.”

  Max drew in a shaky breath but said nothing.

  “He said Elisa sent him to kill me.”

  Max started walking very quickly. Half-running beside him, Sarah told how Nico had saved her life, how he had helped her get Bernard out of there, and how they had pretended to the others that he had fallen down the stairs. How she had searched Bernard’s room for clues, how she knew that no one would ever believe her without proof. How she had taken Bernard’s costume, padded herself up to be his size, and tricked the marchesa into believing that she was talking to Bernard himself at the party. Finally, Sarah played the recording for Max.

  “Her mother will learn she died in a taxi crash on the way to the airport.” The marchesa’s words slithered out of the iPhone like a serpent.

  Max listened, his face unreadable. They walked on in silence, under the arcades of Wenceslas Square, past the cheesy nightclubs, uphill toward the brilliantly illuminated National Museum with its impressive gold dome.

  Wenceslas Square was not a bad place to ponder murder and political mayhem. The country’s first proclamation of independence had been read aloud here in 1918. The Nazis had marched here, and been marched against. In January 1969, twenty-year-old Jan Palach had set himself on fire here to protest the Soviet invasion. In 1989, hundreds of thousands of people had gathered here peacefully in what would come to be called the Velvet Revolution.

  Now, decades into capitalism, the square was lined with strip clubs and fast-food joints. Max sat down on the steps of the imposing museum.

  “I never learned to play chess,” Max said at last. “I’m not a strategist. I don’t really think ahead. I just do whatever seems right in the moment.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Elisa asked me to marry her,” said Max.

  Sarah blinked.

  “She made a good case for the tax advantages, and the fact that our lineages would be consolidated.”

  Sarah stared at a tall woman in a pink Afro and hot pants lighting a joint while standing on the curving bronze cross set into the paving stones that marked where Jan Palach had ignited himself.

  “Are you . . .” asked Sarah at last, her mouth dry.

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you going to marry her?”

  “I told her I’d have to talk to my accountant before I committed to her plan.”

  Sarah and Max stared at each other.

  “I can’t even imagine what kind of prenup you’d need,” Sarah said at last.

  Max laughed, although for a second Sarah thought he might bidthe crying a little, too.

  “What’s upsetting is that she came really close to having me convinced,” Max said. “I mean, she said that this was a marriage in the oldest sense, to unite a splintered noble house, to consolidate holdings of art and real estate for the future heirs. She acknowledged that she’s older, and that she would never expect me to be a real husband to her, except for certain events and to produce children. She named lots of examples, kings in Sweden and dukes in Luxembourg. She talked about our duty to our history, to the Czech people. She made it sound like the right thing to do. And all along, she’s been the only one saying that I actually have what it takes to be the head of the family. She fought with her own family and took my side. But it was all a lie.”

  “She’s very good,” said Sarah quietly. “Like, Borgia good.”

  Max nodded. “But what do we do now? We can’t go to the police with any of this, can we?”

  Sarah shook her head. It was the blackest moment of the night. Even the floodlights on the statue of Wenceslas barely penetrated the gloom. Somewhere nearby someone was shouting the way drunks do just before they pass out.

  “You should go home, get out of here,” groaned Max as if he were waking from a dream. “What if Bernard had killed you? My God.”

  “I’m okay,” said Sarah. “I’m not leaving.”

  “We’ll never prove she killed anyone. Your recording convinced me, but it won’t hold up in court. She’s too smart for that. And I bet she really does have a videotape of Bernard. God knows what else. Maybe it’s better to just give in to her. You know, like in a Mafia family. Make my peace wit
h it. I could marry Elisa and walk away from it all, let her run it, take a salary. Go back to the States, work on my music, forget any of this ever happened. It’s too big a mess.”

  “You can pretend to yourself that you don’t care about any of this,” Sarah said. “But you do, and the longer you go on trying to deny that, the more time and ground you lose to people like the marchesa. You may not be a born strategist, but you need to become one. We have got to make a plan.”

  “Step one, keep you alive,” said Max.

  “Step two, you need to keep Elisa close but not too close,” said Sarah, practically choking on the name. “She needs to think you heard some wild accusations from me that you didn’t believe. That it’s driven us apart. Don’t turn down her marriage idea. Tell her you’re exploring it. It will help keep both of us alive.”

  Max looked at her admiringly. “Yes. And step three is to gather something we can take to the police to stop her.”

  “I’m worried about the opening,” said Sarah. “Both the marchesa and Charlotte Yates will be there.”

  “Along with ninety-seven different kinds of security and hundreds of other dignitaries. If Charlotte wants to keep her past hidden, the last thing she’s going to do is make a scene here, of all places.”

  Sarah nodded but still felt uneasy. “Max, there’s something else, isn’t there? I know you’ve been keeping something from me.”

  Max looked at her.

  She had trusted him. But to work it had to be mutual.

  “I know what Sherbatsky was looking for when he took the drug,” said Sarah. “But what were you? I know it can’t have just been your mom. Why did you and Nico act so squirrelly when I mentioned hell portals? Why were you so interested in the cape I found in the library? What did you really hide in a safe in Venice? Why did you keep taking the drug even when you knew it was dangerous to do it by yourself?”