City of Lost Dreams: A Novel

by Magnus Flyte

  She was not on a roll. Gerhard had gone.

  Thinking through her next move, Sarah wandered back through the Haus der Musik’s highly interactive and well-curated exhibits. She would have loved this place as a kid, Sarah thought as she passed children wearing headphones, listening to different frequencies. She lingered just a minute at a display of Beethoven’s household expenses in one of his sixty-eight different apartments in Vienna (“marrow, 8 kreuzers”). When no one was looking, she pressed her hand against the pale green door from Beethoven’s last residence. Luigi, come out and play with me.

  Yep, I’m just as crazy as everyone else.

  The final exhibit of the museum consisted of a virtual Zubin Mehta inviting participants to take a turn at “conducting” the Vienna Philharmonic on a video monitor. Sarah watched a boy of about ten attempt to set a tempo for the “Radetzky March.” His parents laughed and applauded as the boy struggled to wave his arms in a regular beat and the recorded performance alternately lurched or dragged.

  It was silly, but Sarah felt a stab of pain in her chest. She had studied conducting as an undergraduate, a requirement for all conservatory students. She remembered raising a baton for the first time in front of a roomful of players. She had felt no fear, which wasn’t saying much, for Sarah. But the experience had been better than sex, which was saying a lot, for Sarah. One of the best moments in her life, really.

  There weren’t many world-class women conductors. There were plenty of world-class women scientists and historians, though. Had she somehow taken an easier path, without realizing it? She, who had always been so fearless? Pols had told her she should be a conductor. Why wasn’t she on the path to becoming the Lioness of Boston?

  Jesus, what was it with Vienna? she thought, heading down the stairs and out onto the street. It made you all introspective and melancholy. No wonder half the intellectuals and artists who had lived here ended up committing suicide. Maybe it was just hard to stand up to all the architecture, all the greatness of the past. Geschichtsbewältigung indeed.

  Sarah called the Konzerthaus to see if Schmitt had returned, but was told he had not. “I am a reporter for the Boston Globe,” Sarah said. “I was hoping for a few minutes of the Kapellmeister’s time this afternoon.” Gerhard, she then learned, was attending an auction at the Kinsky Palace. She set off to cross the Innere Stadt of Vienna.

  Her plan could use a little finessing, anyway. What would she do if, when confronted, the Lion just said, “She is crazy/I don’t know what you’re talking about/Yes, I took her laptop and you can’t have it.” Threaten to cut off his hair? Threaten him with her plastic sword?

  She would tell him about Pollina. The man was, after all, a musician. Whatever was going on between him and Bettina was none of her business.

  Sarah turned right on Krugerstrasse, which became a lovely pedestrian-only street, and crossed swanky Kärntnerstrasse, passing Café Mozart and traversing the triangular Platz toward red and white banners denoting the majestic white stone (shocker!) façade of the Lobkowicz palace, completed in 1687. Beethoven had walked on this street. For a moment she thought she could see the back of his head just in front of her. Hey, Luigi, turn around! Wishful thinking. To see the past you needed really good drugs.

  Vienna was a difficult city to hurry through. It was so distracting. Sarah crossed Michaelerplatz and looked up at Looshaus. The Modernist work of architect Adolf Loos had so shocked Emperor Franz Joseph in 1911 that he ordered all the curtains on the windows of his palace that faced the “horror” to be permanently closed. The big scandal had been merely the house’s simplicity, and its windows’ lack of ornamental detail. It was now considered a masterpiece.

  It was easy to imagine how startling the building would have been, though, especially to people used to something like the Palais Kinsky. Sarah drew up in front of the white (you don’t say!) and yellow building, which fronted on a lovely little Platz. A dynamic pair of scantily clad sculpted gents held up a Baroque doorway to the palace. She moved into a white rotunda crammed with more statues and massive cast-iron lanterns, before she was politely blocked by a uniformed concierge. The auction, she was told, was a private one. Sarah flashed her Boston Public Library card.

  “I am a journalist,” she said. “I am here to meet Kapellmeister Gerhard Schmitt.”

  But the impassive concierge didn’t laugh and kick her to the palatial curb. Kapellmeister Schmitt, she was told, had already left the building.

  Sarah made another call. The Kapellmeister would not be able to speak with her. He was in rehearsals for the rest of the day at Theater an der Wien. Sarah looked at her map. The theater was about four blocks away from where she had just come from.

  Sarah decided that she could schlep no more Platzes and jumped on a tram.

  Theater an der Wien was quite cheerful looking: yellow and green. The Papageno Gate at the entrance featured the feathered sidekick from The Magic Flute playing his pipes, and the front door was open, which was refreshing. Apparently the management didn’t mind tourists taking a peek at the famously ornate interior. She wouldn’t have to try to brazen her way in as some sort of Lois Lane.

  The inside of the theater was overwhelming. Sarah stood completely alone in a jewel box of red and gold. She turned around and around, gazing up at the massive height of the stage, the frescoes adorning the round ceiling, the tiers of boxes. So many performances, so much history.

  Entranced, she walked up the stairs onto the stage and stood where Beethoven had stood, conducting the premiere of his only opera, Fidelio. The composer had lived onsite for several months beforehand, finishing the work. It had been a difficult time in a life filled with difficult times. Beethoven had struggled with the work. The occupation of Vienna by the French had depressed him and hurt his finances. And his hearing was going.

  So he had done what he had always done in difficult times. Written music that didn’t quite sound like anything else and challenged his listeners to follow him or not.

  She closed her eyes and breathed. Then she raised her hands, feeling the heroic measures of the Fidelio Overture in the tips of her fingers. The opera told the story of a woman, Leonore, who must rescue her husband, Florestan, from the prison where he has been unjustly incarcerated.

  It was electric. Luigi, I can feel you.

  And she could see the orchestra, all eyes on her. The music had to come out of silence, had to emerge from emptiness inexorably, inevitably. She coaxed the violins gently as they began their faint melody, then signaled the percussion. E minor. Every member of the orchestra needed to be engaged in this battle. No one gets left behind!

  The sound of a door shutting somewhere broke her concentration. What on earth was she doing?

  “Hallo?” she called. “Anyone here?” She crossed into the wings and found herself backstage. She tilted her head back, peering through the darkness up into the soaring flies, making out lights and ropes and metal catwalks.

  “Hallo?” she called again. Really, she thought, anyone can just walk in here? Surely the management didn’t want people tromping around on the stage or poking through the sets and scrims. At any rate, the Kapellmeister was probably in the rehearsal rooms of the building somewhere, and not here on the actual stage. Sarah stepped back into the theater and was halfway up the aisle when she heard a collection of voices. Her sharp ears caught Gerhard’s name being used. She hesitated.

  “Okay, Fritz? Bring down the platform, please,” someone shouted backstage. “Kapellmeister will want to see it. When he shows up.”

  A hydraulic motor sounded and two men in work clothes came onto the stage.

  “Hey!” one of them shouted, spotting her in the aisle. “What are you doing here? This is a private rehearsal!”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sarah apologized. “The door was open. I am meeting Kapellmeister Schmitt.” A large platform, draped with billowing fabric, was slowly descending toward the stage.

  “I’m glad to know he’s still coming,” the man said d
ryly, before turning away and shouting more orders. “Karl! Get the door! Put out that damned sign!”

  “Do you know”—he turned back to Sarah—“where the Kapellmeister is?”

  Sarah did know, but for the moment all she could do was point to the platform now hovering just above the stage.

  The Lion of Vienna lay sprawled across the platform’s edge. The angle of his head told her that he was very, very dead. And next to him, clasped in his arms . . . a woman. Surely there was another girl in Vienna, Sarah thought desperately, who had hair that particular shade of pink?

  Someone other than Nina Fischer?

  SEVENTEEN

  “There you are!”

  Max looked up from his desk and smiled. Harriet was glowing and looked happy, which was nice because lately she had seemed kind of off . . . tense and nervous. So it was good to see her looking like her usual self, which was sort of a funny thought since Harriet was dressed as Polyxena Pernstein, 1st Princess Lobkowicz: long dress in some stiff white fabric with red sleeves and gold florets and a high white ruff. She had been filming in the palace this morning, before the museum opened. A program on the Lobkowicz family for the BBC, which Max hoped would spark some more tourist interest.

  “That suits you,” Max said, nodding at the costume and sliding the little book on Philippine Welser he was reading into his pocket.

  “Thank you, darling! My figure fits into period dresses quite well. Most women these days are too tall. I hardly ever have to have things specially made. And I actually don’t mind wearing a corset. I rather like it, actually.”

  Max rather liked it, too, though he wasn’t crazy about the ruff, which looked like one of those cones you put on dogs to keep them from licking wounds.

  He had been glad that Oksana’s digging around in Harriet’s closet had not produced any skeletons.

  “Everything go well?” he asked.

  “Very. Come and look at the footage? I think you’ll be pleased.”

  “Can I look tonight? I’ve got to go to Kutná Hora today.”

  “Kutná Hora?”

  “You know it?”

  “Of course.” Harriet leaned against his desk. “I considered doing an episode of Histories & Mysteries at Sedlec Ossuary, several years ago. But they wanted heaven and earth for filming rights. The Beeb isn’t Hollywood, and I’m afraid Hollywood has spoiled the Czech Republic. Thankfully, you are not so greedy. What takes you to Kutná Hora?”

  “Oh . . . potential board member lives there. So . . . just boring museum stuff. Sorry.”

  Harriet smiled. “Not to worry. I have plenty of work to do.”

  “How’s your book on Elizabeth Weston coming?”

  “Writes itself,” trilled Harriet. She came over to give Max a kiss. Then a deeper one. Then she pulled him up and began stroking the front of his pants. Harriet really did get turned on by history. She liked reenacting scenes. They’d done Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and Napoléon and Josephine, but they hadn’t done any from this particular era and Max wasn’t sure how he was supposed to deal with the ruff.

  “I guess women in the sixteenth century couldn’t have a lot of spontaneous sex,” he mumbled as he tried to undo the heavy buttons of her bodice. “Too much clothing to take off.”

  “Women,” Harriet said, turning around, hoisting her heavy skirts up, and presenting her creamy naked pale ass in all its glory, “have always known how to manage these things.”

  • • •

  An hour later, Max was zooming past orderly rows of pine trees and plowed-under fields in his red Alfa Romeo convertible. The Czech Republic boasted the highest highway mortality rate in Europe. People here hadn’t been driving that long and the cars were mostly old. But you had to drive fast, because everyone else did. Unfortunately, it was too cold to have the top down, though the sun was unexpectedly bright today. Max reached forward to the glove compartment to get his sunglasses.

  “Looking for these?” asked Nico from the passenger seat. The little man—who was wearing Max’s Dolce and Gabbana shades—handed Max a pair of oversize pink ladies’ sunglasses.

  “Cool, thanks.” Max put them on, pretending to look undisturbed. It was a game they played, and like all the games one played with Nico it had no real beginning or end, just an endless circle of parries and thrusts, moves and countermoves.

  Max could not remember his mother’s funeral, but he knew that was when Nicolas had first shown up in his life, telling Max’s father that he had been a friend of the departed woman, and thereafter making occasional appearances. For many years their relationship (as well as Nico’s lack of visible aging) had largely gone, by Max at least, unexamined. Nico was a fact, not necessarily good or bad, though some kind of loyalty bond did exist between them. When Max’s father had died, Nico had been the first person Max had called. Nico had come. And when, later, Max had taken Westonia and had seen the little man, four hundred years earlier, on a street in Prague, it had not seemed so very surprising. Suddenly everything about Nico and his presence in his life, and his lack of visible aging, had made complete sense.

  Harriet, Max knew, did not like Nico very much. It was a problem. Sometimes Max wanted to strangle the little man, but he couldn’t stand anyone saying a word against him. The only time Max had ever punched someone was when his roommate at Yale had referred to Nicolas as “your crazy midget buddy.” Admittedly, during his visits, Nico had overly enjoyed college life and eventually been banned from New Haven after an incident involving a stolen ibis. Anyway, Max hadn’t told Harriet the truth about the real reason for coming to Kutná Hora, or about going with Nico, and this was a problem, too. If Harriet was going to be a part of his life, he would eventually have to tell her about . . . everything.

  Of course, the main problem with Harriet was that she wasn’t Sarah. Not cool to make comparisons, but he couldn’t help it. You couldn’t help who you loved.

  “Kutná Hora was a ringleader in the Bohemian Uprising against Philippine’s father-in-law,” said Max. “I want to check if there’s anything about her or Ferdinand that’s been overlooked in the archives there at the Gothic Stone House. And the Alchemy Museum has what exactly?”

  “A drinking horn made with the talons of a griffin. The story is that the beast gave his talons to Saint Cornelius and that the drinking horn will neutralize any poison.”

  “And it . . . does?”

  “No.” Nicolas fiddled with the radio station. “I just want to impress all my buddies at the next Dungeons and Dragons convention.”

  “Okay.”

  “It belonged to Edward Kelley,” Nico said, relenting. “I don’t need it myself; I just wanted to see if it’s still there. I’m testing a theory.”

  “You really think Kelley is your Moriarty? You’ve always said what an ass he was. You said Tycho Brahe thought he was an idiot.”

  “Do you know what Tycho recommended for the cure of epilepsy?” Nico switched off the radio. “The head of a person who has been hanged. Decapitated by other means is okay, but only if it was execution and not accident. Crush the head with peony seeds until you get a nice powder. Don’t take it at the full moon.”

  “So, they were all idiots in some ways. Kelley, John Dee, Brahe, all the alchemists.”

  “They were relentless. They always had to know more. It made them cruel. Ah, we’re almost there. Kutná Hora. It hasn’t changed much.”

  “When was the last time you were here?”

  “Not in this century,” Nico said, briefly; and then, after a pause, “Nor the last.”

  • • •

  Nico stared at the road unspooling in front of them. The thought that he might have a real opponent out there had invigorated him, but, he realized, it had also brought back memories he had long pushed aside. Things he had never talked to Max or anyone else about. Tycho Brahe had changed his life—Tycho was Nico’s Dr. Frankenstein—but it wasn’t Tycho that he was thinking of now.

  After Brahe died, Nico’s life in Prague had become v
ery difficult. He had tried to make his way back to Denmark, to Sophie, the Master’s sister. Sophie Brahe had been Nico’s first and greatest love. The most gifted alchemist he had ever known, and the first person who had ever treated him with kindness. But he had been robbed on the journey, and beaten, and thrown into prison. The notebooks in his traveling bag had been enough for a conviction of heresy. It was worth wondering what would have happened if he had not escaped before his execution date. Would the fires have raged about his person and then blown out? Would he have had to spend the last four hundred years with third-degree burn marks covering his body? When he had at last arrived in Elsinore, Sophie was nearly insane. He had cared for her, he and Livia, Sophie’s maid. And when Sophie died in 1643 he had tried to slit his wrists. No matter how deep he made the cuts, the blood had refused to gush, though they had remained open wounds for about a hundred years. Livia was a fair alchemist herself, and she had done her part to help him, even experimenting on herself with various combinations of drugs. They hadn’t really come close. Livia had only managed to extend her life to age 143.

  Nico was still here.

  He had almost given up on dying, and it had nearly driven him mad. And now there was a glimmer of hope. If the Fleece had been found, or if there was a serious alchemist in the game, then the end might actually, finally, be nigh. It gave him such purpose, to think he might die soon. He would like to make a lovely death. Oksana would miss him, but Oksana was tough. He would like to help Pollina if he could, before he went. He would like to help Sarah, if she would let him. And he would like to know that Max was okay. You couldn’t help who you loved.

  • • •

  “‘Removed for curatorial purposes,’” said Max, reading the card. They had found nothing about Philippine or Ferdinand in the archives at the Stone House, either. “Okay, let’s talk to the curator. This isn’t the British Museum; it’s three rooms. There will be records, something.”

  “There will be no records.” Nicolas smiled. “There aren’t many records of where I’ve been, either, my dear, or what I’ve done. One learns how to cover one’s tracks. I’ve spent a couple centuries walking backward in my own footprints, dragging sleds behind me, erasing, deleting, obscuring. Don’t worry about it. I have an idea.”