City of Lost Dreams: A Novel Read online

  Early Praise for City of Lost Dreams

  “A magical mystery tour that picks you up and takes you where you’ve never been before but is exactly where you want to be. Sexy, suspenseful, historical—an absolute page-turner.”

  —M. J. Rose, international bestselling author of Seduction

  Praise for City of Dark Magic

  A New York Times Bestseller

  A USA Today “New and Noteworthy” Pick

  “This deliciously madcap novel has it all: murder in Prague, time travel, a misanthropic Beethoven, tantric sex, and a dwarf with attitude. I salute you, Magnus Flyte!”

  —Conan O’Brien

  “A comical, rollicking and sexy thriller.”

  —Huffington Post

  “An entertaining mix of magic, mystery, and romance, it’s one of the most original novels released this year.”

  —CNN.com

  “Never fails to shimmer exotically, erotically, on the page.”

  —Slate

  “The most wickedly enchanting novel I’ve ever read and also the funniest. A Champagne magnum of intrigue and wit, this book sparkles from beginning to end.”

  —Anne Fortier, bestselling author of Juliet

  “I was sold on newcomer Magnus Flyte’s recent novel when I looked at the clock and realized that I’d been reading for four hours without pause. . . . Smart, sexy, and self-aware.”

  —Tor.com

  “The riddle of Beethoven’s ‘Immortal Beloved,’ alchemy, and clandestine love fuse in this fast-paced, funny, romantic mystery. . . . An exuberant, surprising gem.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sometimes you want a book that simply entertains, and City of Dark Magic does just that. There’s a bit of everything, and when one scene seems impossible, know that the next will top it. Go with it. It’s a good ride and a great way to escape reality for a bit.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “The darkly charming and twisted streets of Prague provide the deliciously dramatic backdrop for this paranormal romp that fires on all cylinders, masquerading by turns as a romance, a time-travel thriller, and a tongue-in-cheek mystery.”

  —Booklist

  “A story that abounds in mysterious portents, wild coincidences, violent death, and furtive but lusty sex . . . [this novel] cleverly combines time travel, murder, history, and musical lore.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CITY of LOST DREAMS

  After the uproar over the publication of his first novel, City of Dark Magic, Magnus Flyte retreated to his dacha in the Urals, where he enjoys exploring underground tributaries of the Ufa, observing the mating habits of the spotted nutcracker, and smelting.

  Mr. Flyte is currently at work on a half-hour television comedy about sixteenth-century ethnographer Sigismund von Herberstein, entitled Ural I Love.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Christina Lynch and Meg Howrey

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Flyte, Magnus.

  City of lost dreams : a novel / Magnus Flyte.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-14-312327-9

  ISBN 978-1-101-60996-5 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3606.L98C58 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2013031311

  Endpaper Illustration by Rodica Prato

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  The Tenth Muse

  CHAPTER TWO: In which I am wronged, again.

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  The Tenth Muse

  CHAPTER THREE: In which I reveal exactly what I did after I died.

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Tenth Muse

  CHAPTER FOUR: In which I discuss what I have been up to for the past four hundred years.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  From the private diary of Elizabeth Weston Notes for the conclusion of my story

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  Acknowledgments

  Editor’s Note

  History allows us to realize the tragedy of human existence in its entirety. Knowing the truth means exiting space and time. All movement is searching. The essence of art lies in thinking and giving shape to visions. This is what changes the world.

  —RUDOLF LEITNER-GRÜNDBERG

  That’s a nice girl, that. But she ought to go careful in Vienna. Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this.

  —GRAHAM GREENE, The Third Man

  PROLOGUE

  Even the local tourism board had to admit the church attracted a rather unusual crop of visitors. Some came for the novelty, others out of a hazy respect for their fellow man, and some came for more sinister reasons. The last group often turned up after hours, when the gates were locked, the laminated information cards in six languages neatly replaced in their color-coded folders, and the ticket takers safely home in their beds.

  About fifty miles east of Prague, the town of Kutná Hora was best reached by a series of country highways pleasantly dotted with fruit stands and artisans selling a patriotic symbol that had been banned under communism: the garden gnome. And in case the Czech place-names with their tongue-twisting traffic jams of consonants proved difficult to decipher for nervous travelers in rental cars, handmade signs in English announcing Bone Church at every intersection provided easy clues for navigation.

  Kutná Hora was just another parish in Bohemia until it got the ultimate status bump when a local abbot returned from the Holy Land and sprinkled authentic Golgothan dirt in the abbey’s cemetery. Word got out that being buried in such sacred g
round was a shortcut to Heaven. A chapel was constructed on the site, and those who felt death’s cold embrace traveled from far and wide to get last rites and be buried in the cemetery. By the mid-1400s, Kutná Hora was the place to die.

  It didn’t take long for the gravediggers to be overwhelmed, their real estate being, as is true of tony enclaves everywhere, in limited supply. Graves were dug deep into the hallowed ground, coffins stacked up like shoe boxes in a fetishist’s closet, but still they ran out of room. Soon it was time to put out the No Vacancy sign and hang up their shovels.

  But, since people paid good money to be buried at Kutná Hora and no one in the hardscrabble area wanted to lose a revenue stream, a solution was quickly found. Older bodies, those from centuries past whose families were no longer around to protest, were exhumed. Treated with the utmost respect, of course, the skeletons were rehoused downstairs in a specially dug crypt, dubbed the Sedlec Ossuary.

  As one might expect, eventually the crypt, too, filled up, and due to some annoying geological restrictions it wasn’t safe to tunnel farther. And still people showed up and died. The piles of bones became quite large and prone to toppling over. For a holy place, it became something of an unholy mess.

  But eventually the vogue of being buried at Kutná Hora passed. Though the bones remained, they were out of sight and out of mind, and Kutná Hora was once again just a nice little place to stop and have a beer and a plate of palachinki on the way to market.

  In the late nineteenth century a local woodsman was hired to be the caretaker of the church. The woodsman pondered the rather spare main rooms of his beloved little house of God. He had heard of cathedrals in far-off cities bedecked with statues and cornices and sculpted arabesques. It saddened him that his parish of simple farmers and miners wouldn’t spring for a little sprucing up, a little face-lift for their place of worship. And the woodsman was horrified by the chaos he found in the basement. So he immediately began to neaten and tidy what he found there. Like the trees he hewed and chopped into manageable lengths, skeletons were untangled and bones were separated by size and shape. Soon there were pyramids of skulls, towers of tibias, and hives of hips. There was symmetry, there was order, and there was beauty. It was a shame, really, that the fruits of his slightly OCD labor were hidden in the basement, while the austere church upstairs was such a poor reflection of the glory of God in the highest.

  The woodsman got to work. He created a chandelier composed of every single bone in the human body. He strung phalanges into strings and then threaded them with popcorn garlands of skulls that gracefully arched from nave to apse. He fanned out scapulae like decks of cards to make the bases of monstrous monstrances topped with more skulls. Skulls and crossbones snaked up from floor to ceiling, delineating archways and barrel vaults.

  Perhaps the crowning achievement was the holy cross itself, crafted out of skulls and leg bones, with slender arm bones representing the gentle rays of celestial glory. Beneath it the woodsman signed his name. In bones, naturally.

  At first the inhabitants, though awestruck by his initiative and undeniable creativity, were wary of having somehow offended God or their fellow man. These were, they reminded each other, actual bones of actual people. Long dead, yes, but still children of the same Lord and due a certain respect. And yet . . . were not the woodsman’s displays a form of veneration? Had he not given forebears and strangers alike a sort of eternal, beautiful life for their remains, while their souls safely resided with the angels in Heaven?

  Also, people came from far and wide and paid good money to see the thing.

  And so the church of bones became one of the Czech nation’s most visited destinations.

  And if, now and then, a car arrived with a rather serious, scholarly woman at the wheel, and a new skull, or set of ribs, or pair of tibias were discreetly, after hours, added to the neatly arranged piles, who noticed?

  No one.

  ONE

  Sarah Weston heard the splash just as Nico got to the part in the story about the gorilla.

  Her plane from Boston was meant to arrive in Prague in the morning, but a series of delays and a missed connecting flight in Heathrow had made her late, which was upsetting as she was on a very particular mission. Hoping to at least get a little background on the situation in Prague, Sarah decided to call upon a master thief and repository of secrets great and small. Nicolas Pertusato suggested she join him at Barbora a Katerina, a chic new restaurant on the banks of the Vltava River.

  “We will sit outside and have a good gossip,” Nico said when she arrived. “It is unseasonably warm for late October. You can admire the view and I can admire you. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you. I intend to bask.”

  In a sand-colored cashmere suit and polka-dot silk tie, Nicolas was easily the best-dressed man in the restaurant. He was also the shortest, being a dwarf, a term he preferred to the more politically correct “little person.”

  Barbora a Katerina had evidently taken its name from the saints Barbara and Catherine, whose images appeared on the restaurant walls and the menus, where the two saints appeared to be somewhat critically eyeing each other’s jewels. (Babs had the nicer brooch, Cathy the prettier tiara.) The setting was exquisite, with the Charles Bridge throwing golden shadows across the river, and Prague Castle on its hill, dramatically lit in emerald green, but Sarah’s mind was on other things.

  “Is it a good sign or a bad sign that Pols is in bed by eight?” Sarah asked as she began her interrogation. “How is her energy? Is she eating?”

  “You will see Pollina tomorrow.” Nico reached over and patted her hand.

  “Yes, but I’m leaving for Vienna in the afternoon,” Sarah reminded him. “I just want to get as clear a picture as possible of how she’s responding to the last round of medications so I can make a convincing case to Dr. Müller.”

  Pollina Rutherford, a thirteen-year-old blind musical prodigy of astounding talent, had moved to Prague from Boston a year earlier. The girl had never been of vigorous health and had lately been plagued by a series of lung infections. In the past several months, these had become much more serious. Sarah had frantically researched everything related to Pols’s illness, a rare autoimmune disorder that seemed to be caused by a malfunction on chromosome 20. When she heard about a nanobiologist at the University of Vienna who was developing a promising new drug targeting mutations in chromosome 20, she had contacted her about enrolling Pols in a trial. And when Dr. Müller had turned them down, Sarah had dropped everything to make this trip to Vienna to change the woman’s mind.

  It wasn’t easy for Sarah to explain her emotions where Pollina was concerned. She had begun tutoring her when she was in high school and Pols was only four, though it was clear from the beginning that in many ways it was the younger girl who was the older soul. Their backgrounds were entirely different. Sarah had grown up in working-class South Boston, had lost her dad when she was nine, had blazed through high school, college, and grad school, all the way to, at age twenty-five, a PhD in neuromusicology on a mixture of ambition and passion. Before coming to Prague, Pollina had spent most of her young life inside a Back Bay mansion, cared for by a devoted but eccentric Mexican housekeeper and left largely to her own devices by her wealthy dilettante parents. But music had erased the disparity of their ages and their experiences. Music, and a sort of kindred fierceness they recognized in each other.

  Cocktails arrived at the table. Sarah’s came garnished with a large wheel of orange slice, and the olive in Nico’s glass was pierced with a giant plastic sword.

  “I ordered you the Catheratini,” Nico explained. “The orange is meant to symbolize the wheel that the unfortunate Saint Catherine was tortured upon, though this is not explained on the menu and perhaps the symbolism is lost on some. My Barbatini, you may note, contains a sword.”

  “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Barbara was decapitated.”

  “By her own father, poor dear. Admit. Impiety tastes delicious. I’m
glad you like it, as I own a share in this place. A side venture of mine. I thought it would be amusing, but I fear that, like everything else, it will end by being either a bore or a heartbreak.”

  Sarah put down her Catheratini. She had been so caught up in her concern over seeing Pols that she was only now noticing that the little man didn’t look particularly well himself.

  But Nico waved off her questions with a hand, attributing his low spirits to the modern climate of political correctness that inhibited flirtation with the miniskirted female waitstaff, and ordered a bottle of Roudnice red.

  “And so, you go to Vienna tomorrow,” he continued. “To bully the nanobiologist into helping our Pollina?”

  “I think this Dr. Müller is just being cautious”—Sarah leaned forward—“because Pols’s immune system is very compromised. Maybe she doesn’t want to take a risk and potentially skew her results.”

  “And you have never taken no for an answer.”

  “I am not leaving Vienna until that bitch says yes.” Sarah smiled. Nico raised his glass to her.

  “Oksana, too, thinks targeting the chromosome itself might be helpful.” Nico sighed. Nico’s wife, Oksana, a nurse, was overseeing Pols’s care. “But these are all drugs of the future, and, as you know, I have much more experience with drugs of the past. I, too, want to make an experiment.”

  “Are we talking alchemy here?” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “I am not letting you give Pols ground-up narwhal horn.”

  “Nonsense.” Nico poured himself another glass of wine. “I haven’t been able to get my hands on that for two centuries.”

  Though he appeared to be in his mid-forties, Nico insisted to his confidants that he was four hundred years old, rendered immortal by the astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1601 in an alchemical experiment gone awry. Sarah was never sure what to believe when Nico was around. What was indisputable was that Nico knew a lot about a great number of things, including chemistry. Sarah herself had been the beneficiary of a rather unusual drug he had replicated. She knew what he could do. But this was Pollina. And it wasn’t a game.