by Magnus Flyte
Well, she had definitely arrived in Vienna.
There had been quite a scene with the police. After Sarah had explained to the officers what she was doing in the lab and they had holstered their guns, one officer had been dispatched to collect Alessandro from the Platz. By then, Nina Fischer had arrived.
It was Nina who had sent the police to the lab. Bettina Müller, it seemed, had phoned Nina in a panic, saying she had gotten a text from a blocked number telling her that her laboratory had been broken into.
“But she couldn’t come herself,” Nina explained. “Because she was already on a train.”
Sarah showed the police her own message from the doctor, though it, too, was from a blocked number. Nina was allowed to look in the lab, though she said the only thing she could find missing was Bettina’s own laptop, which the doctor might very well have with her. Sarah, Nina, and Alessandro were all taken to the station to make statements. They filled out form after form, repeating all their information, and signing reports. Neither the Polizei nor Nina was able to reach Bettina Müller, who, by the end of the evening, was under suspicion of having stolen her own laptop from herself.
• • •
“Perhaps she is not getting phone reception on the train,” Nina offered, outside the police station.
“Do you know where she lives?” Sarah asked. “I’m sorry. I’m really not a crazy stalker. It’s just that I urgently need to speak with her. She did invite me to the lab tonight. . . .” If she had even sent that message.
“I don’t.” Nina raked her fingers through her pink hair. “Somewhere near the Naschmarkt, I think. She always breakfasts there. Shit. But, look, she should be back by Friday at the latest. That’s when our team always meets. And there is a concert that night, at the Konzerthaus. She never misses when Kapellmeister Schmitt is conducting.”
“I’ll stay till then,” Sarah said, frustrated. “Maybe she’ll be back in touch.”
• • •
In the morning, Alessandro left to teach his class on synaptic connections, and Sarah decided to breakfast at the Naschmarkt, an open-air market near the Secession Building.
A year ago, Sarah thought, as she made her way down the wide boulevard of the Museumstrasse, she would have been thrilled just to be in Vienna. The summer she’d been invited to Prague to catalog Beethoven’s papers for Max, she had planned to visit Vienna until Prague had nearly consumed her, literally. Now she figured she could use the time waiting for the return of Bettina to explore the city, visit all the places where Beethoven had lived. (Though that might take more than two days. Beethoven was a notoriously bad tenant and had lived in nearly seventy different apartments.) She could go to the Lobkowicz Palace here, where the Eroica had premiered. She could visit Beethoven’s grave in the Central Cemetery.
Sarah stopped in front of the Secession Building. Sporting clean classical lines, it thumbed its nose at the huge and heavy Baroque, Gothic, and Renaissance pastiche that surrounded it. The gold filigree ball atop the building was commonly thought to look like a cabbage, but Sarah thought it looked sort of like a golden brain. She paid her admission fee and made her way downstairs to see Klimt’s famous Beethoven Frieze—inspired by Luigi’s “Ode to Joy” and painted for a 1902 exhibition that was an homage to the composer. Painted on thin plaster, it had never been intended to outlast the 1902 show, but had ended up being sold, cut into seven pieces, and stored in a furniture depot for twelve years before being sold again, this time to an industrialist and patron of Klimt, August Lederer. Conveniently for the Nazi leaders who “collected” art, the Lederer family was Jewish, and so the Nazis dispossessed them in 1938 of their extensive Klimt holdings, including the frieze. After the war, ownership of the frieze returned to the current heir of the Lederer family, living now in Geneva; but conveniently for Viennese art lovers, an export ban was placed upon it. Eventually, in the 1970s, the heir sold the frieze to the Austrian government, probably because at that point it was desperately in need of repair and the sale was the only way to save it. A tragic history for a work that had been inspired by a symphony meant to celebrate the equality and brotherhood of man. But at least everyone could look at it now. For a fee.
The mural encircled the whole room and was observed from an elevated platform. A pair of stylish Brazilian women were taking pictures of the frieze with their phones when the guard’s back was turned, apparently intending to reproduce it in a master bath. The frieze’s narrative began on the left wall: female robed figures, eyes closed, floating with arms outstretched in front of them. Genii, Sarah read in the pamphlet. “Yearning for Happiness.” The women looked like they were dreaming.
Sarah’s own dreams the night before had been filled with the sound of Pols’s horrible coughing. Coughing that had taken on a three-quarter-time melody, as if to rebuke Sarah for every step she had waltzed the night before.
She focused now on three supplicating naked figures in the panel before her, a kneeling man and woman, and a girl behind them. They were pleading in front of a knight in golden armor, turned away from them in profile. Behind the knight were two more female figures. The brochure identified them as “Ambition and Compassion.” Sarah found it hard to look at the simple figure of the naked girl. She looked resigned, as if she didn’t much expect the golden knight would help her.
The next panel was titled “Hostile Powers.” Skeletal gorgons with snaking golden jewelry, a naked crone with pendulous breasts lurching behind them, and a lascivious siren with tendrils of long red hair, legs bent and pulled up to her chest, watched over by a richly garbed procuress. In the center, a giant, black, winged, gorilla-like beast with mother-of-pearl eyes and jagged, broken teeth.
Sarah thought about the hostile power threatening Pols. Not a huge hairy monster with wings, but something too small to be painted. A defective chromosome. It would be easier, Sarah thought, glancing back at the knight in armor, if the threat were something she could pick up a golden sword and take a satisfying swipe at.
In the final panels of the frieze, the Arts (more floating women, and one with a lyre) led to the higher plane, where Man and Woman embraced in a mystical union and a chorus of stylized women sang. Sarah contemplated this for a while. She had never really thought of the Ninth Symphony in terms of visual images. Did she agree? Was this what the “Ode to Joy” looked like? No. It was too artificial, too sensual, too . . . pretty. Beethoven, she thought, would not have cared for it.
Thinking this made her intensely lonely for Beethoven. It was absurd to “miss” Beethoven, but she did. The Westonia-drug-fueled visions where she had seen the great man, heard him speak, seen him play . . . they had changed her forever. She had felt connected to him so profoundly. And now here she was, in a place where there should be traces of him everywhere, looking at art that supposedly honored him. And he was invisible to her.
Sarah left the museum and headed to the Naschmarkt, feeling melancholy, which wasn’t helped by a drizzle of cold rain. She ordered a mélange, the Austrian equivalent of a latte, and a Topfengolatsche, which was Austrian for “You have gone to pastry heaven. You’re welcome.” Sugar inspired, Sarah wondered if maybe Nina Fischer knew of any similar work to Bettina’s being done somewhere else. Sarah thought she had run down every other avenue when she was in Boston, but maybe . . .
Her phone beeped.
I had to leave. My life is in danger.
What the hell?
Dr. Müller? Sarah texted back. Where are you? And how do I know this is you?
After a moment, her phone beeped again. There was a photo of her own cover letter on Pols’s medical records. Then another message.
I can help your friend. Will you help me?
SEVEN
Nicolas Pertusato woke up in a very comfortable bed at the Ritz. The woman next to him was snoring. Nico studied her, curious. She lay on her back, but her large breasts pointed skyward in defiance of all gravitational law. Silicone. Nico lifted the sheet and inspected her pubic hair, or, rathe
r, the lack of it. Just a narrow strip. It was definitely the twenty-first century, then.
Nico lay still for several minutes, running through an internal checklist in his brain. He reminded himself of the current day of the week, month, and—most important—year. For extra credit he named the phase of the moon: waxing gibbous. He cataloged the state of his physical health. Remarkably, he was not hungover. After leaving Soane’s he had gone to another pub, perhaps two, and he remembered picking up a wallet and also—more vaguely—this creature.
Nico sat up.
Why had he been so despairing yesterday? Really, looked at in the proper light, the whole thing was actually . . . interesting.
Someone had been alchemy shopping all over London. That in itself wouldn’t be so surprising—there were millions of crackpot theorists around, on scavenger hunts for the Holy Grail or Excalibur or Bigfoot. It was entirely possible that someone had conceived a quest for the Golden Fleece. But someone knew that Nico was looking for it, too. Someone had sent Saint John to Nico’s restaurant of saints. Someone had left a dwarf figurine in place of a medicine chest. No wonder he hadn’t been able to find anything of John Dee’s that traced back to the Fleece.
Who was his antagonist? Anyone who could connect him to the Fleece had been dead for hundreds of years. And even then, the only people who knew that he had briefly held the book could be counted on one hand.
Sarah knew. But Sarah wanted nothing to do with alchemy, even though she had a PhD in it. What did she call herself? A neuromusicologist? Please. An alchemist by any other name would smell as sulfurous. Max? Max was desperate to find the Fleece, not to use it, but because he believed it was part of his family’s duty to protect it. Secret Order of the Golden Fleece, sworn protector knights, and so forth.
Anyway, to work. Nico still had a few tricks up his sleeve. His opponent might have temporarily gained the upper hand, but now Nico was invigorated. Inspired. There was nothing like having a worthy adversary to liven things up.
Sherlock Holmes had needed a Moriarty to bring him out of his chronic ennui.
And so had he.
Nico hopped out of bed, took a bath, and decided a shave was really in order, as he needed to look respectable for today’s plan. He had just lathered up when his evening companion stumbled through the door, collapsed in front of the toilet, and heaved. Nico soaked a towel in cold water and handed it to her.
“Oh, thank you,” she said, in quite cultured tones, closing the lid and then sitting on it. She was a lovely woman, but Nico turned his attention to his chin. He hadn’t shaved in about fifty years. He didn’t get five o’clock shadow. He got half-century shadow.
“Last night was quite an experience. I’m beginning to remember it now. You are incredibly . . .”
“I know,” said Nico.
“Oh.” Nico could see in the mirror that she was staring at his naked back. She leaned forward and touched him. “I remember. Your scar. Got in a fight with gypsies, I believe you said?”
“I never fight with gypsies.” Nico examined his teeth. “Nor should you, if you ever come across one. No, this was self-inflicted, I’m sorry to say.”
“You stabbed yourself in the back?”
“It seemed funnier at the time,” Nico conceded.
“Also . . . your wrists.”
Nico glanced down at the very faint white lines that marked his wrists.
“What if I told you I couldn’t kill myself even if I wanted to? What if I told you I was immortal because of a scientific experiment gone awry, that for four hundred years I’ve watched all my friends die, everyone I loved or cared for, while being unable to die myself?”
“I would assure you that this is a delusion. Not common, maybe, but one I’ve seen before, with varying specifics. I would tell you that such delusions can be treated.”
Nico looked at her and she laughed shyly.
“I’m a social worker. My name is Lucinda, in case you’ve forgotten. Lucinda Smythe-Crabbet.”
He had forgotten. There were just too many names. And this creature had three of them. And a title, he now recalled.
Really, Nico thought, after bidding Lady Lucinda a fare-thee-well outside the Ritz, he had always acted rashly when it came to women. You would think that after a couple of centuries he would have gotten this under better control, but no, humans were built to be irrational and could evolve only so far, no matter how long you lived. You might get past one or other of the big three—desire for love, fear of death, belief in God—but not all three at once. Buddhist monks came close, and Nico had met some severely autistic children who had surpassed the human condition, but Buddhism required intense meditation (which he was far too Epicurean to practice) and the other was denied to him by virtue of his genetic makeup, imperfect and frozen as it was.
• • •
At eleven a.m. Nico presented himself at gate A of the east wing of Blythe House, the massive Victorian building that had once been a National Savings Bank and was now used as storage for the spillover collections of a number of museums. The red and white brick edifice was topped with coils of barbed wire. From the outside it looked like an insane asylum. The inside was even worse: dirty glazed yellow tile, crumbling staircases, dimly shadowed corridors. But it had quite a lovely, cheerful staff, and all one needed to gain admittance to have a look at a certain object from the Wellcome Collection was an appointment. Once buzzed in, Nico made his way to the porter’s office, presented his credentials, and received a yellow plastic visitor’s pass. He was met by a Miss Ponds, who was delighted to show him the object he had requested.
“I expect you’ve been to see the permanent collection at the Euston Road museum?” she chirped. “It’s wonderful. But of course, it’s only a tiny portion of what Henry Wellcome gathered during his lifetime. He had agents all over the world hunting down artifacts, curiosities, medicines, tools, anything to do with the human body. Most of this would seem very primitive and wrongheaded to us now, of course. But it’s a fascinating glimpse into the history of medicine. There were over a million objects in the collection, you know.”
Nico did know. He had been an agent for Henry Wellcome in the early 1900s and had once spent a harrowing six months in Khartoum in his employ. Henry had been the first to market medicine in tablet form to the general public, and his pharmaceutical company had made him immensely rich. The man had been obsessed with immortality, was totally without a sense of humor, and had bizarre notions of temperance, insisting that none of his employees touch alcohol. Despite all that, Nico had rather liked him. Like most true eccentrics Wellcome had fewer prejudices about the differences of others, at least other men, and had treated Nico well, even making one of his custom medicine/tool chests in just his size. He still had it.
Miss Ponds was punching a security code into a door. Security here was very good, no need for cameras in any of the individual rooms, which was lucky for him. Miss Ponds gave him a pair of plastic gloves and they stepped inside a narrow cell lined with shelves.
“Now, let’s see . . .” she said, bending down. Nico whipped a syringe out of his pocket and stuck it firmly into Miss Ponds’s conveniently upturned ass.
“Oops-a-daisy,” she said, before collapsing on the floor.
Nico ran his eyes over the shelves. He had requested to look at a particular specimen: a stuffed ram’s head mounted on wheels. The top portion of the head opened up to reveal a compartment. In fact, Nico had no interest in this object, which he felt was obscene, and not in the way he usually found pleasant. No, he was after something a bit older, something he had given Henry from his own personal collection, as a joke, and to make up for all the things he had bought with Henry’s money and never handed over.
“The box is late seventeenth century,” he had told him, presenting it. “You can see that it contains some sort of powder within. The man who sold it to me swore it was electuarium mithridatum.”
Actually, the box contained the crushed bones of an elk that had belonged
to Tycho Brahe. Albrecht had been his name. As much as an elk can be an asshole, Albrecht had been an asshole. Henry had been delighted with the box, and with what he thought was the acquisition of a sample of the seventeenth-century antidote against poison and infectious diseases. According to the Wellcome Collection database, the box was housed in this room, as item #7963.
Yes. Here it was, neatly tagged and with the false description of the contents lettered in tiny script. Holding his breath, Nico carefully opened the jar. The powdered remains of Albrecht had survived.
Score one for the dwarf, thought Nico. He could manage a fair bit of alchemy with genuine seventeenth-century elk bone. Particularly when the elk in question had died while under a massive dose of beer and Tycho’s Westonia. God knows where Albrecht had thought he was when he fell down the stairs to his death. Cavorting with mastodons, perhaps.
Nico pocketed the box and replaced it with one of his cards:
Removed for curatorial purposes.
“Mhmm,” mumbled Miss Ponds. Nico bent to her side and helped her to her feet. “What happened? Did I faint?”
“It seemed as if you were going to.” Nico dusted, perhaps a trifle too enthusiastically for Miss Ponds’s taste, the knees of her skirt. “Perhaps you bent over too quickly.”
“Oh. Oh, how strange. I’m so sorry.”
It took a few minutes before Miss Ponds’s composure was restored, and then a dull half hour while he pretended to admire the ram’s head snuffbox and make a few notes.
Nico exited the building and hailed a cab.
“Heathrow,” he told the driver.
EIGHT
Sarah strode through the Naschmarkt, searching the stalls for a glimpse of Bettina. Had she not left town after all? Was she following Sarah? What game was this woman playing? Another message arrived.
There is something in the refrigerator of my apartment that must be returned. Use maximum discretion. No police.
