by Magnus Flyte
Whatever was in the refrigerator, Sarah was guessing it wasn’t leftovers.
What is it? And who do I return it to?
But the return message read only: Paniglgasse 18. The concierge will let you in. Tell no one or I will not help you.
How do I know you will help me? Sarah texted furiously. This wasn’t what she had imagined would happen in Vienna. This wasn’t how scientists operated. . . . This was as bad as fucking Prague!
I can save your friend. Do this for me. I will contact you tomorrow.
• • •
Sarah got directions to Paniglgasse, which wasn’t far. It was a lovely residential street, with nothing sinister about it. An efficient Viennese mom unloaded two strollers and a standard poodle from a smart car while her somber towheaded children in wool coats with velvet collars waited like tiny sentries. Sarah tried to be reassured by this as she walked through an arched entrance into the courtyard of Bettina Müller’s Neo-Baroque building. A large golden retriever lay protectively across a doorway, and at her approach sat up and barked. This action was followed by the opening of a ground-floor-level apartment door and the appearance of an exceptionally tall and thin old man, bald, his trousers belted slightly below the region of his armpits. He stood glaring at her like an Austrian eagle. Sarah introduced herself in German.
“Yes!” he interrupted sternly. “I am Herr Dorfmeister. Frau Doktor Müller has told me to expect you and that you would be picking up a package.”
“Yes.”
“I will give you the key.” He frowned. “I have been instructed to do so.”
It occurred to Sarah that it was probably a good idea to make as many friends as she could with people who knew Bettina Müller. She needed allies. Or someone to run screaming to if Bettina’s refrigerator contained a human head.
“Herr Dorfmeister, what is the name of your dog? She is very beautiful.”
The transformation was magical. Herr Dorfmeister melted. He patted Sarah on the shoulder. He smiled. He introduced his dog, very formally. Her name was Candy, after Candice Bergen, whom Felix Dorfmeister admired as a great actress, particularly for her work in the television show Murphy Brown. Sarah was familiar, of course, with Murphy Brown?
Sarah, who had no idea who Candice Bergen was, smiled agreeably and, when Candy brought Sarah a mangled tennis ball, instituted a vigorous game of fetch in the courtyard. Apparently thoroughly charmed now, Herr Dorfmeister found the key and showed her to where the old cast-iron elevator was and how to work the doors.
“Apartment 6,” he said. “And Frau Doktor Müller asks that you not let the cat in under any circumstances.”
Sarah entered Bettina’s apartment to the sound of gentle tickings, whirrings, buzzings, and clickings. She saw that the kitchen was directly to the right of the entranceway, but Sarah needed a sense of who this woman was, and decided to explore. She moved into a large, high-ceilinged room and revolved slowly in the middle of it, her eyes wide.
She was surrounded by clocks. Clocks of all sizes and shapes. Clocks in brass, silver, gold, pewter, porcelain. Long case clocks and smaller mantelpiece clocks mounted on shelves. Clocks surrounded by carved figures, clocks with swinging pendulums, clocks that showed the movements of the planets, pocket watches mounted in glass cases. The actual furniture of the room was IKEA utilitarian and very light on personal ornaments: no photographs; no figurines or mementos. More shocking to Sarah was the absence of books.
She looked over the rest of the apartment and found a small room that seemed to be used for random storage and laundry, a large bedroom, and a bathroom. The bedroom and bathroom showed signs of normal use: all the closets contained clothes and shoes and the bathroom cabinets were crammed with cosmetics and unguents. Bettina used a heavy perfume, something with a lot of musk in it. The bedroom had a giant flat-screen TV and huge Bose speakers. And about a hundred more clocks. Not all of them were functioning, but the ones that were seemed to be working harmoniously with one another. Their tickings gave the apartment a strange sort of pulsing vibrancy. Like being surrounded by heartbeats, Sarah thought. No. Like being inside a heartbeat. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was actually kind of . . . soothing. The apartment was very stuffy, though. She was sweating.
The kitchen had all state-of-the-art appliances. A half-drunk glass of wine and plate of rice and vegetables in congealed sauce sat on the table next to take-out cartons. Sarah turned to the refrigerator. An Einstein magnet held a schedule of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra to the door. Several dates were circled, including one for the coming Friday.
Sarah opened the door. No food, not even shelves, which had apparently been moved to make way for a large white box.
A box large enough for, in fact, a human head. Maybe even two.
It wasn’t terribly heavy. Sarah set it on the floor and loosened the lid. Inside, she found a rather beautiful golden model ship with a clock on its prow. It was elaborately constructed, with little figures on the deck and furled masts and everything. The whole contraption sat on wheels. It looked old. And valuable.
Stolen? Bettina was obviously an obsessive clock collector. It was hard to imagine a dangerous black market for clocks, but Sarah knew that art smuggling was big business, and this thing was definitely art. It would account for the secrecy. No police.
Why had Bettina put it in the refrigerator, which she couldn’t even lock? Sarah’s mother, who cleaned houses for a living, had once told her about a client who kept her diamonds in the freezer. Was it something like that? Or because it was really hot in Bettina’s apartment and the heat would damage the clock? Sarah threw open the kitchen window to let in some fresh air. There was nothing on either the object or the box to indicate where it came from, or where Sarah should return it. This was going to be tricky.
Sarah sat down at the table, trying to re-create Bettina’s evening in her mind. She had returned home from work, enjoyed a little pad Thai, and then she had gone to the ball. To meet her accomplice in trafficked goods? To get in a little waltzing? Sarah had thought the woman seemed thoroughly spooked and she had—according to Nina—jumped on a train before receiving a message that her lab had been broken into.
Was Sarah being set up? Or had Bettina gotten into something way over her head and was hiding out now?
Out of the corner of her eye Sarah noticed a thin gray cat sitting on the windowsill, staring at her. Crap! Herr Dorfmeister had said something about not letting a cat in. The animal gave her a triumphant glance and streaked straight across into the hallway, where it began furiously scratching at one of the closet doors. Sarah managed to get the cat by the back of its neck, holding it out at arm’s length. The feline attempted a few wild scratches on Sarah’s arm before she tossed it back out the window and shut it.
Okay. She needed to move smoothly, swiftly, and in a planned direction. First thing was to find out where this contraption belonged. Sarah pulled out her phone, took a few pictures, then began searching the Internet. It turned out that the item was pretty unique, and that the combination of “ship clock gold” was all it took.
It belonged in the British Museum.
The person with obvious museum connections was Max, but Sarah was reluctant to involve him. There were limits to what you wanted to do for your ex. And he might tell Harriet, and Bettina had told her to tell no one. Nico was another obvious choice, but Nico was better at stealing than returning.
It would be better to get it into the hands of a local museum curator somehow, someone who would be able to see it safely restored to London. Sarah thought about whom she could ask for help without implicating them.
By the time Sarah had repacked the ship and found a bag under Bettina’s sink to put it in, it was all settled. She had texted Alessandro, asking only if he knew anyone in the museum world in Vienna, and he had suggested Renato, a second cousin of his whom he had never met but who was a Facebook friend and worked at the Kunsthistorisches, Vienna’s gargantuan art museum. Within a couple of minutes, Sarah and Renato
were also Facebook friends, and she sent him a message asking if he would advise her on an “art-related problem.” Renato messaged back that he was working late at the museum this evening, but could meet her at nine, in Maria-Theresien-Platz, and they could go for a drink. Anything for a friend of a Facebook friend/cousin/Italian.
Social media, plus nepotism, plus nationalism. Fifteen minutes, a couple of messages, and she was in.
And so Sarah set off across Vienna, carrying the ship in a bright yellow BILLA supermarket bag. She hoped she looked like a local on her way home from shopping, and not like a newly minted art thief.
NINE
Since Sarah had not wanted to leave the box unattended in Alessandro’s apartment, she had spent the afternoon flipping through Vienna guidebooks and more or less babysitting the model ship. She had found out what she could about it: a sixteenth-century “galleon” possibly owned by good old Rudy II. This object was right up his alley. Fully automated, it had once been able to trundle down the length of a table, playing music from the organ on its hull, the toy sailors in the crow’s nest striking hammers to announce the time, electors processing on the deck before the seated emperor, and cannons firing smoke.
She had found nothing on the Internet about the galleon having been stolen, which was reassuring. She tried to come up with legitimate reasons why a nanobiologist would have a treasure from the British Museum in her fridge, but quickly gave up. For Pols’s sake, she would do as she was told without asking questions.
Sarah had spent some time studying Renato’s Facebook profile. His picture was of a bust of Apollo, which Sarah hoped meant he had a sense of humor. Of course, that didn’t mean he would be okay in helping her with trafficked goods. At least she didn’t have to worry about Alessandro, who had neurology rotations at the hospital and wouldn’t be home until late.
So Sarah read and looked at pictures of Vienna’s tourist attractions. The guidebooks, she noticed, stayed clear of the city’s most recent history (no Hitler tours) and instead focused on the glories of Imperial Vienna, the Secession and Jugendstil, the café culture, the music. Sarah had already noticed that nearly every shop window in the city contained images of either Klimt’s The Kiss or a portrait of Empress “Sissi,” the melancholic, anorexic, and ultimately assassinated wife of Emperor Franz Joseph.
It was dark when Sarah arrived at Maria-Theresien-Platz, another grand testament to those ultimate size queens, the Hapsburgs. Two massive structures with identical Neo-Renaissance façades, the Kunsthistorisches and the Natural History Museum, faced each other across an expanse of formal gardens, complete with fountains and statues. A gigantic monument to Maria Theresia presided in the middle of the Platz, with the plump and motherly looking empress holding out one hand as if to say, “Welcome, my dears. Don’t muck up the shrubberies.”
Comfortably settled on a throne atop Corinthian pillars, Maria held in her other hand the Pragmatic Sanction, the document her father, Charles VI, had worked for during his reign, which would secure her succession since there were no male heirs. Maria Theresia would hold on to the throne for forty years, pop out sixteen children (including the next emperor, Joseph II, and one Marie Antoinette), and fight a couple of nasty wars. She was one of the few Hapsburgs who wasn’t inbred, though she had plenty of crazy ideas. Violently anti-Semitic and superstitious.
“Sarah?” Renato greeted her in English. He was a slight, dark-haired man with a long thick scarf wrapped around his neck. Sarah held out her hand and Renato touched her fingers lightly with his gloved hand. Sarah saw that part of his face was covered with a blistering rash.
“My condition is called seborrheic dermatitis and it is not contagious,” he said quickly, in a slightly mechanical tone that let her know he had said this very often. Before she could respond, he pointed with his chin at the statue of Maria Theresia. “One of my favorite monuments in Vienna. She always reminds me of my mother, who sits exactly so in the chair at the salon in Piazza Navona while she’s having her hair done.”
“Does that make you Joseph II?” Sarah smiled.
“No, Marie Antoinette.” Renato laughed. “So, shall we go for a glass of wine and discuss your art-related problem? I have a very boring life so I was really grateful for your message.”
“Actually . . .” said Sarah, who then ran through a creative version of “helping a friend who had been given something she thought had been stolen.”
“I know this is a terrible imposition,” Sarah said, hefting her bag. “And I don’t even know if this thing is real. But if it can be done discreetly, it seems the best thing to do is get it back to the museum it belongs to. If it is the real thing, it’s probably incredibly valuable. At the least, it’s very old.”
“How old?”
“Sixteenth century.”
“Pfft.” Renato made the Italian man’s noise of dismissal. “That’s not so old.” He appeared to think things over for several minutes, then asked, “Do you know where it is supposed to be?”
“The British Museum.”
Renato whistled.
“Show me?”
“I can’t really whip it out in the Platz,” said Sarah. “It’s big.” She hefted the BILLA bag. Renato pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking again.
“Okay, here’s the plan.” Renato’s eyes were now twinkling with excitement. “We will go in through the security guard entrance, which actually has the fewest cameras. I will bring Thomas, my favorite guard, a nice espresso. I will introduce you as my friend. Then I will ask if we can use his service elevator, which I am not supposed to do, but he will let me and he won’t search your bag because it will all be very friendly and so forth. You will use your feminine wiles on Thomas. Then we’ll go straight to my tiny office, which is inside the antiquities wing. Everyone in that part of the building will be long gone, and the security guards only patrol outside the wing. They find the inside too spooky, apparently. Or maybe they are afraid of me.”
“Okay, that sounds good. Then what?”
“Then you show me what you have and then we figure out a nice safe place to leave it and then we go get a drink and a nice pasta.”
“Mille grazie,” said Sarah. “If something goes wrong, act really surprised when they haul a priceless artifact out of my bag.”
“This is so exciting,” Renato said. “Nothing like this ever happens in Vienna. Or maybe just never to me.”
“Sadly,” said Sarah, “things like this happen to me all the time.”
• • •
The first part of the plan went surprisingly well, though Sarah made no attempt to use feminine wiles on Thomas. It was clear that the man had eyes only for Renato, who made jokes and seemed relaxed, but whose hand shook when he handed the barrel-chested guard the espresso. Sarah thought that the audacity of smuggling “loose” art into a museum might have caught up with his nerves, but in the service elevator Renato admitted that seeing Thomas was pretty much the happiest part of his day, and that he had nursed an enormous crush for several years.
“I look at beauty all day long,” he said. “But, you know, it’s all long-dead beauty. Still, a guy can dream.”
“He obviously likes you,” Sarah said. “Maybe you should—”
“He’s just a nice person,” Renato interrupted. “He’s way too perfect looking to be into someone like me.” The elevator doors opened and Sarah stepped into a twilit ghostly hall. The floor was a beautifully laid out geometric pattern of black and white marble. The ceiling was vaulted and decorated with elaborate stucco designs and paintings. Her nose was flooded by the scent of lavender.
“Holy smokes,” she said. “Is this place . . . perfumed?”
“Piped in the vents.” Renato nodded. “Very subtly. You have a good nose.” He led her across the hall to the antiquities wing, unlocking a door and waving a magnetic card over a sensor. She followed Renato through room after room of busts, cornices, jewelry, small figures, lamps, coins, and pottery. It was a huge collection. Although, Sarah t
hought, she had hardly visited a museum that didn’t seem to have an enormous amount of Greek and Roman antiquities. Had anything those people touched not made it into a museum? Or was it just that if something was made four centuries before Christ, you couldn’t just toss it, even if it was only a comb?
Renato unlocked a small door in the corner of a room filled with sarcophagi and she found herself in a small, book-lined office, just like hers back in Cambridge. Only better organized. And where she kept a silly papier-mâché bust of Beethoven that a friend had made for her, Renato had the bust of Apollo from his Facebook page. Renato saw her admiring it.
“Two thousand years old, and still working it, right?”
She set the BILLA bag on Renato’s desk. “For an antiquities expert this might not seem so impressive, but have a look.” Renato took off his thick gloves and replaced them with a thin fabric pair, textured at the fingertips. She saw that the skin on his bare hands was also peeled and patchy. It looked painful. She complimented him on the gloves.
“I made them myself,” he said, handing her a pair. “Latex and I are not friends. The gods have a terrible sense of humor, bless their hearts.”
Sarah glanced at the gleaming pale curves of Apollo’s face in the corner. Greek and Roman statues, she knew, had originally been painted in bright and lifelike colors. Only time had worn them down to smooth whiteness, rendering them exquisite and remote. Did Renato choose antiquities because things of the past were easier to be around? Or was it like her feelings about music—to be near greatness, to try to understand it, to show it to others, was the thing that gave a point to existence?
“This is like Christmas!” Renato gently cut away the paper and bubble wrap to reveal the galleon. “What a lovely toy. Beautiful craftsmanship.” He bent down to examine the figures on the deck of the ship. “What do you know about it?”
“It was made by a German clockmaker. Rudolf II had it at some point. It’s an automaton, though apparently it doesn’t actually move anymore and the clock, obviously, has run down.”
