by Magnus Flyte
Pollina shut her mind to the thought that Boris would not be around forever. It would be impious to feel sad about Boris dying, since his death would deliver him to the arms of God. Also, she still had music to learn today.
A blind musician could learn music in one of two ways. The first was to read Braille manuscripts, a laborious and time-consuming process, as she had to use one hand to read and the other to play, and then switch, and then combine both parts. Pollina had once described this process to Sarah as being like trying to understand a book by reading every other word, then going back and reading all the words you missed, and then combining them. Sarah had gotten in touch with several assistance programs for the visually impaired and found a network of people who volunteered to record themselves reading scores for the blind, note by note.
Pollina wondered how long it would take Sarah to realize that science was good, but art was better. Sarah was a natural conductor and she needed Sarah to conduct her opera. She had decided that it would be about the Golden Fleece. There would be a lot of conflicting musical motifs, and Sarah would be able to control the musicians. She could be quite impressive when she put her mind to it, and very perceptive for a sighted person. Pols reached down, scratched Boris’s head, and, feeling that she had rested long enough, sat back down at the piano. She put the earbuds of her iPod back in.
Memorizing Mozart took a lot of concentration. She had to be quite disciplined and focus simply on the notes until she had it. Otherwise she had a tendency to drift while learning, feeling Wolfgang’s thought process, his energy, his joy, his pain. These things were very distracting.
Pols flexed her fingers over the keyboard and repeated a passage. And again. And again. Her mind was drifting. She was tired. She was dreaming a lot. Bad dreams. About Sarah, and a round white room. She didn’t feel very well, to be honest. There was pain. Sometimes it was in just her lungs, and sometimes it was everywhere.
And the pain was bad. She needed to think about something else. Someone else. That was the way out of pain.
Sarah is in danger.
The voice was clear in her head. Pols stopped playing and stood up.
She heard voices in her head. She always had. These voices came from God, and so there was no question of Pols being crazy. She was not crazy. Sarah was in danger.
Nico had said he would be going to see Sarah in Vienna. Nico was a good protector, but he didn’t always take things seriously. She should speak with him. Pollina thought he was probably with Max in his study.
“We’re going to go see Max,” she shouted at Boris. “Good boy.” Boris barked an assent, pleased to have a job. They moved into the hallway. Pols knew the palace well and she did not need her cane here. She moved down the hall, touching the walls lightly with her fingertips.
Oksana was in Max’s office, too. Pollina could hear her voice in the hallway. Oksana wasn’t happy with the way her body was responding to the drugs. Maybe she would make the doctors stop forcing her to take them. They really only seemed to make things worse.
It would not be right to eavesdrop on their conversation. It would, however, be polite to wait until they stopped talking. And if she accidentally overheard things from the hallway? Well, she couldn’t help having good hearing. She was blind and her nose was stuffed up! She only had two operating senses!
“This man who accosted you in the church,” Nico was saying, “I can’t find any trace of him. I checked homeless shelters and mental health clinics.”
“Maybe faster to ask my friends to find him,” Oksana said.
“Is there any place the Russian mafia isn’t connected?” Max asked.
“No,” said Nico and Oksana simultaneously.
“You want me also run check on Harriet?” Oksana asked. “Is routine in good families to do background check on girlfriends. The ones who don’t, they are sorry.”
That’s when Pollina heard it. A very small noise coming from the door next to Max’s office. But that was Max’s bathroom. She moved quickly to the door and wrenched it open.
“Oh!” said a voice, and then the sound of the toilet seat squeaking and movement. Harriet, Max’s stupid girlfriend. “Oh, hello!”
“Sorry.”
“Oh, not to worry. I had quite finished and it’s just us girls!” Toilet flushing, and then Harriet stepped past, clacking in her high heels. “Pollina, dear, may I help you with anything?”
Pols could hear a sudden silence from Max’s office.
“Bathroom,” she mumbled, stepping in and shutting the door. Well, Harriet wasn’t going to make her a liar. She would go since she was here. She reached forward.
Funny. The lid was down. She hadn’t heard Harriet put the lid down, just flush. And the top of the lid was warm. So Harriet had just been sitting there? No. Pollina had heard bare feet on the tiles of the bathroom and then Harriet had walked past her in heels. She had been standing on the toilet. Why?
The answer became clear when Pols stood on the toilet herself. She was smaller than Harriet, but reaching up she could feel that the sound was coming through a small grated vent. A taller person could put her ear against that vent. Pols didn’t need the vent, though. Her ears were sharp enough to hear what Harriet must have been listening to.
“Oh, Harriet,” said Max, in his office. “Come in. Nico and Oksana were just leaving.”
THIRTEEN
“How you find her missing computer?” asked Alessandro. “You are not a detective. Let the polizia find it. She is pazza.”
It had crossed Sarah’s mind that Bettina was possibly a little pazza, or at least in the throes of some kind of paranoid nervous breakdown. Since she was feeling not quite ten pins up herself, she had confided in Alessandro, but only to the extent of saying that she had gotten a text from the doctor, and that Bettina had asked her to find her stolen laptop.
Alessandro announced he was making a risotto con funghi porcini, opened a bottle of Brunello, and ordered her to begin chopping onions and parsley. “I am doubling the recipe. You need your strength,” he said. “My mamma was from Milan and she make me risotto before every one of my exams. My father was pure Napolitano, so he make pizza. I was a very fat bambino.”
Sarah sipped her Brunello and weighed her options. She felt trapped. It sounded as if Oksana and the team of doctors in Prague had basically thrown up their hands. Whether Bettina Müller was crazy or not, Sarah couldn’t just walk away. Not yet.
Together she and Alessandro decided that Nina Fischer, Bettina’s grad student, should be her first stop. She might seek out Marie-Franz, too, while Sarah was at the university. The professor had been there a long time. At the very least, she could fill her in on what Bettina’s colleagues thought of her.
Why would someone steal a laptop? When Sarah’s last machine had died, it had been annoying, but not devastating. Everything was backed up, so she guessed Bettina’s concern wasn’t so much about what she was missing, it was more about who had her stuff and was looking at it. Not surprising, since in addition to her research, Bettina was trafficking in stolen art and possibly in illegal hallucinogens. Sarah could be walking headfirst into several different kinds of criminal intrigue. She poured herself another glass of wine and, just for good measure, added another scoop of risotto to her plate.
• • •
She awakened from a tumultuous sleep on Alessandro’s pullout sofa at eight, regretting both the extra helping and the final grappa he’d insisted on as a “digestivo.” She had dreamed that she was in a round white room, surrounded by doors. She was holding Pollina in her arms. There was something she had to do to save Pols, something urgent, behind one of those doors, but if she picked the wrong one . . . There had been a woman there, too, dressed in clothes constructed from strange discs of gold. Sarah had felt the weight of the garments as if she were wearing them herself.
“I cannot die,” said the woman.
Time was running out. Sarah began to open a door, and as the certainty washed over her that she had made th
e wrong—terribly, terribly wrong—decision, she woke up shouting, “No!”
• • •
Alessandro took her to historic Café Landtmann for breakfast on their way to the university. Waiters with white jackets and black bow ties executed a complicated ballet around the restaurant, ducking in between tables, swooping and gliding between the chairs. The café sat next to the Burgtheater, another titanic white building, one of the biggest theaters in Europe, built to satisfy the desire of Empress Maria Theresia, who wished to have a playhouse near her palace. In 1943 “Die Burg” had hosted a notoriously anti-Semitic production of Merchant of Venice. At the time, almost all the Jews of Vienna had already either fled or been sent to camps, but perhaps the gods of Tragedy and Comedy that sat atop the building, at least, had been offended by the production. The building had been almost totally destroyed in World War II. And then restored, as Vienna had been restored. Up from the ashes.
At a nearby table an Englishman ranted about the poor curation of the Freud Museum, while his wife did a crossword and complained of “Platz fatigue.”
“This café was the favorite place of Dr. Freud,” Alessandro said to Sarah.
“How do you think Freud would have interpreted a dream of a round white room?”
“You want a penis,” guessed Alessandro, a little too loudly. The couple sitting near them looked over, and the man laughed a little.
“I thought you were a neuroscientist.” Sarah took a sip of her mélange. “What about short-term memory consolidating events into a hierarchy according to emotions and a lot of random synapses firing during the process?”
“Sì,” said Alessandro. “And then there is my nonna’s idea that the dreams are the reality, not this. I like best Freud’s idea that it is always about sex.” He licked his spoon lasciviously.
Sex, but also violence, Sarah thought, were the undercurrents of Viennese history carefully papered over with postcards of Sissi and dancing white horses. A hundred and forty years had passed since Johann Strauss wrote his waltz “Vienna Blood,” and there had been quite a lot of real blood spilled in the city since then. The final decimation of the Hapsburg Empire, two world wars, the attempt to wipe out an entire race. And yet, the famous cafés of Vienna with the famous waiters still served the famous coffee and cakes. No wonder the city had been the cradle of psychoanalysis.
Sarah went to the bathroom, leaving Alessandro perusing one of the many newspapers hung on wooden poles for the customers’ use. As she passed the glass case of sweets, she heard a gruff “Grüss Gott,” and turned to see the bearded horse rider she’d met at the ball entering from the street and saluting the maître d’. She remembered he smelled good but had been exceptionally rude, so she pretended not to see him and kept going, but when she emerged from the ladies’ room he was waiting for her.
“Frau Doktor Weston? I am Gottfried von Hohenlohe. We met at the ball.”
“Yes, I remember. Are you coming from another one?” Sarah indicated the loden cape he wore over a three-piece suit.
“No.” He looked down at his cape, puzzled. “It is cold today. This is Austrian.”
Sarah smiled, trying to imagine an America where it was considered natural to tog out like Betsy Ross.
“Ah, you tease,” he said with a smile. “Because I was so rude at the ball. You must forgive me. I am ill at ease around beautiful women.”
“I doubt that. I’m glad you are able to understand my German today.”
“You are picking up the accent, I notice.”
He touched her arm and Sarah felt all her senses kick into gear. Rude or not, Gottfried definitely had a certain magnetism.
“Gottfried,” called a voice from a near table. Sarah saw it was the schlumpy older guy from the ball who’d made such an incongruous pair with Nina. He was carrying a leather briefcase and wearing what she guessed was an expensive raincoat, but somehow on him it looked messy and rumpled. Nina had definitely picked the wrong von Hohenlohe.
“You remember my brother, Heinrich,” said Gottfried. “Are you in Vienna long?”
“A few days.” Sarah nodded. “I should get back to my friend,” she said. “Nice to see you again.”
“Perhaps you will allow me to give you a tour of the Spanish Riding School some day after morning exercise.” Gottfried handed her his card, which had nothing but his name in raised letters. He took a gold fountain pen out from under his cape and wrote his number underneath. “The stallions are quite remarkable up close.”
I bet they are, she thought with a sigh. She pocketed the card, thanked him, and rejoined Alessandro.
“Not interested?” he asked, since of course he had been observing the whole thing. “I thought you and Max were over.”
“Maybe interested, but I’ve got other things to do here,” said Sarah. She didn’t want to talk about Max with Alessandro—or anyone, for that matter. The feelings for him that had resurfaced when she was in Prague were confusing, and there was enough confusion without going into all that. So she switched the conversation over to Nina as they left the café.
“How well do you know her?”
“We only sleep together once,” he said, making Sarah laugh. Of course he had. “I know when she was sixteen she ran away from little village outside of Salzburg. I remember this because Salzburg is town of strange movie The Sound of Music which you force me to see.”
Sarah had taken him to an outdoor showing on the Boston Common, where people had dressed up and sung along, which the Italian had found alarming, though not alarming enough to prevent him slipping off with a girl dressed as a warm woolen mitten.
“Is she really dating that older guy?” Sarah asked. “Heinrich? Seems like an odd match.”
“She is odd girl.” Alessandro shrugged. “This thing with the raccoon eyes and the hair and the tattoos, the Italian girls they do not do that. They like to be beautiful, as beautiful as possible. I know Nina only start working for Bettina this past semester, helping in the lab. What else can I tell you? Ah. Her labia, she is pierced.”
“Not helpful,” said Sarah. “But thanks.”
• • •
“Who doesn’t have a grudge against Bettina?” said Nina, whom Alessandro and Sarah had arranged to meet on one of the benches outside the immunology building. It was cold, and Nina had suggested they move up to the lab, where she needed to check in on the rats. Alessandro had gone to work, which Sarah was glad about. She didn’t want him distracting Nina.
“She dismisses all of her grad students at the end of every semester,” the girl was saying now. “And yet she’s so brilliant that we all line up again, like lambs to the slaughter.”
Nina threw a white lab coat over her ripped plaid jeans, Doc Martens, and Debbie Harry T-shirt safety-pinned together, and started making notes on the rats. She said that Bettina had sent her a message to keep things running, but hadn’t left any more instructions than that. They moved back and forth between German and English, which Nina spoke very idiomatically, though with a thick accent.
“She basically told me she was hiring me because I grew up taking care of goats,” said Nina, surveying her rodent charges in their cages. “I guess I should thank my asshole father who made me work on the farm since I was three years old, since because of him I have no problem with blood and shit. I clean up after the rats. And then I cut them open.”
“So you have talked to her since the break-in?”
“She sent me a couple texts, but she’s being really cagey about where she is. Not that I blame her. Weirdos send her hate mail all the time. Religious zealots or just regular people who hear about what she’s doing and think she’s going too far. But that’s what gets me off about nanobiology. It’s a crazy inventive branch of science, like mad scientists, you know, and Bettina is one of the maddest scientists in the field.”
That Sarah didn’t doubt.
“People just don’t get it, but then, most people are idiots. Yeah, and a lot of sick people write to her, too, begging her
to help. So she has to deal with that. Oh”—Nina blushed—“sorry. I forgot about your friend.”
“It’s okay,” Sarah said. “But can you tell me anything about the work? I know that at least part of it is on cytokines, and I know people think cytokines are now believed to be the ‘software’ of the immune system.”
Nina seemed relieved Sarah wasn’t offended. Despite the punk exterior, she was as friendly as a puppy, and hugely enthusiastic about her work. It wasn’t difficult to picture the country girl who had run away from goats and ended up with rats.
“Cytokines are hot right now,” Nina explained. “We know they send messages, but not why they sometimes screw up and send bad ones. Where the bad input is coming from. It might be in the DNA itself. Maybe from what we call the noncoding part.”
“Bad messages.” Sarah nodded. “So you need to tell the DNA to send a different message.”
“Exactly. That’s what Bettina has figured out, how to do it. But I can’t tell you much more than that. I don’t even know myself. I do the grunt work. Not that I’m complaining. It’s totally a privilege.”
“How do you send a message to DNA? I mean, how does a drug do it? And is it a pill or a . . . a mist?” Sarah wondered if the drug in the galleon was part of Bettina’s experiments. It had certainly had an effect on the immune system. But Nina showed no glimmer of recognition.
“A mist? That is funny. Okay, first you take carbon, right, like just plain old ashes from the fireplace?”
Ashes to ashes, thought Sarah. How appropriate.
“You give the carbon atoms an electric charge so they form into a lattice on their own, like nano-size chicken wire. Then you roll that into a tube, and that’s the vehicle for whatever you need to attach to it and send into the cell.”
“And because it’s made of carbon just like everything else, the body doesn’t recognize it as an enemy substance and doesn’t fight it off?”
“You got it. It can zoom right into the nucleus of the cell and even attach to the DNA itself.”
