City of Dark Magic Page 14

  “You,” said Sarah, “have graher with, ot to be kidding me.”

  “No, he’s right,” said Max, peering. “That really is Neil Diamond.”

  “Okay,” Sarah folded her arms. “Which one of you is Starsky and which is Hutch? And what’s BIS?”

  “Czech Security Information Services,” Nicolas answered, ordering an espresso with a flick of his wrist. “Spies, in other words. Forgive the cloak-and-dagger theatrics, which actually I adore, but let me remind you that a man is dead and on the other side of the river is a palace filled with priceless works of art with some very shady histories. Prague is a threshold.” Nicolas stood up and gave Sarah a courtly bow. “And it is steeped in blood.”

  “And full of hell portals,” added Sarah sarcastically, then realized they were both staring intently at her.

  “You know about the hell portal?” asked Nicolas.

  “Yeah, it’s right under the unicorn’s stable,” said Sarah, laughing. “C’mon, guys.”

  Nicolas relaxed and smiled. “Sarah, I enjoyed our dinner enormously. Max?”

  “Give Oksana my best.” Max nodded. “And give me back my cigarette case, you little thief.”

  Nicolas sighed, took the slim gold case out of his jacket pocket, and handed it to Max. Again Sarah saw the flash of a mysterious symbol.

  “And my lighter?” Max asked, patiently.

  The little man slid it across the table, winked at Sarah, and disappeared into the night.

  “Mmm, crostini?” Max said, reaching across the table.

  “Where have you been?” Sarah tried to keep her voice neutral. She felt extraordinarily . . . relieved to see him. Yes, that’s what it must be. Relief.

  “Sorry. I got caught up and I didn’t want to risk calling you. I’ve been taking care of business,” Max said. He signaled for the waiter to bring him a menu. “And trying to open a museum, too, by the way. We’ve got the Delft china specialist coming and some dude who specializes in dog art.”

  “Seriously?”

  “The Lobkowiczes have always loved dogs,” Max said, gravely.

  Your dogs lived better than my ancestors, thought Sarah.

  The waiter handed Max a menu, which Max placed in his lap. After a moment, he handed it to Sarah.

  “Anything else you’d like to order?” he asked, eyeing the menu significantly. Sarah sighed and opened the menu. Inside were a series of 8x10 black-and-white photographs. She pulled the menu closer to her chest to study them.

  “This is what was in Andy’s camera? That looks like a safe,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  Sarah slid the photograph over to look at the next one. A man’s hand, reaching for the safe dial. The following two were close-ups of the dial itself; the first finger and thumb of the hand were out of focus, but the numbers were clear. In the final photograph, both the hand and the numberandre clo were fuzzy.

  “Eight, thirteen, something,” said Sarah.

  “I couldn’t get it any better than that,” Max apologized. “But it does narrow our focus significantly.”

  “That’s the safe in Miles’s office,” Sarah stated, frowning.

  “Visible from the scaffolding outside the far window,” Max said. “If you are lying on your stomach and you have a really powerful zoom. I checked.”

  Sarah closed the menu and handed it back to Max.

  “Andy was a spy, I’m thinking,” Max said quietly. “But was he working alone or for someone? That’s what I want to know. And I think we need to find out what Miles has in that safe.”

  And speaking of secrets, Sarah thought, reaching down into her backpack and pulling out the letter Jana had given her. What’s your secret, Max?

  “Sorry,” she said. “What with the dead body and all, I sort of forgot to pass on your personal mail. Jana asked me to give it to you.”

  Max opened the letter, read it through quickly, and then stuffed it in his suit pocket.

  “Just a receipt for a hotel bill,” he said, dismissively.

  Oh really? Sarah thought. She pulled out the fourth-grade class photograph Nicolas had given her and slapped it on the table in front of him.

  “Andy was spying on Miles,” Sarah said. “You were spying on me. Nicolas has been spying on everyone. And by the way, he seems very certain that Sherbatsky killed himself.”

  “Pertusato said that Sherbatsky killed himself?”

  “He insists that he jumped.” Sarah watched Max take the last crostini, the bastard.

  “Saying he jumped is not the same as saying he committed suicide.” Max’s voice was hesitant.

  “Well, why else would he jump?” Sarah asked sharply. But Max did not answer.

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” he said, after a moment. “Fourth grade was never the same after you left.”

  Sarah slung her backpack over her shoulder.

  “I’m going to take Nicolas’s advice,” she said. “I’m going to go back to your stupid-ass palace and spend the rest of my summer focusing on my work. I’m going to look at manuscripts, and transcribe, and take notes, and . . . and . . . think about a five-foot-four shlub from the wrong side of the Rhine with bad gas and some serious daddy issues, who was still ten million times the man you or I or anyone else I know will ever be. Whatever else is going on, just leave me out of it, okay?”

  Sarah stood up and walked majestically away from the table, stopping only to accept a small box of chocolates from the smiling waiter.

  “Thank you for visiting the Four Seasons,” he said in English. “Please come again.”

  Across the street from the hotel, concertgoers were spilling out of the Rudolf of daddyinum. Charles Bridge was still crowded with tourists, with lovers, with exasperated locals just trying to get home. Up and down the river, nighttime Prague glittered and blinked, beckoned and hid itself. Sarah took the long way up the hill, stumping across cobblestones, willing herself not to be entranced. Showing her security card to a guard at the castle gates, she caught the Sexy Stabber leering overhead.

  Oh, fuck off, she thought.

  At the palace she could hear laughter, conversation, the clinking of glasses coming from the kitchen.

  That’s where I should be, she thought. That’s who I should be with. Her mother had always told her not to get taken in by rich people. “They use you,” she had said.

  Sarah stomped down the stairs to her windowless room, threw her backpack on her bed and herself down next to it. A spring jabbed her painfully in the ribs. She was irritated by how irritated she was. Now, Sarah thought, would be a good time to investigate a proper Christian death. But the ars morendi was on the table across the room and Sarah did

  n’t feel like moving just yet.

  Unzipping her backpack, she rooted around for the photograph, but her fingers closed around something else.

  The little copper pillbox. Its lid was, she now noticed, in the shape of a nose.

  “What would you expect to find in a pillbox?” the little man had asked.

  Mysteries. Sarah was tired of them. Fuck mysteries.

  Sarah picked the piece of . . . something out of the box, held it in her hand for about half a second. Then she put it in her mouth and swallowed.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Big whoop, thought Sarah with more than a little disappointment. She checked her watch—fifteen minutes had passed after swallowing the toenail-shaped pill, and she felt nothing except boredom. All I ever do on drugs is fall asleep. It had been like that every time she had tried to alter her consciousness. Sarah had come to the conclusion that she was not malleable—drugs just didn’t work on her. Even at the dentist, she simply clenched her fists and told them to go ahead and drill because anything they gave her just made her groggy.

  She had her nose, that was enough. And her ears.

  Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, but then sat bolt upright, a feeling of panic suddenly rising in her chest. Her head was vibrating, like a cerebral earthquake, and then all of her senses felt strange. Her
vision blurred, and sounds seemed far away but too close all at once. She had vertigo, and the touch of the coverlet under her hand was rough and painful. Worst of all was the onslaught of a stomach-churning stench.

  Sarah stood up, but as she did, the dark room began to fill with sounds, and light, and people. So many people. The outlines of their bodies, faint at first, began to sharpen and solidify. She tried to push back into the corner, afraid of suffocating. How could so many people fit into a single room? She panted, terrified of the swelling noise and crowd.

  It’s the drug, it’s the drug, she told herself, but she began to hyperventilate, and tried to push through the bodies to the door. Pushing turned out not to be necessary. The people—there were too many—were not corporeal—she could walk through them. But their vaporous forms crackled with sparking energy, like touching hundreds of light sockets, and now the sound of their voices all talking, shouting, crying, laughing at once was intolerable. The smell, too, was as if a thousand years of smells were condensed into one reek. Her nose was overwhelmed and this more than anything made her feel crushed, suffocated, even as she realized nothing was crushing her except her own panic. She rolled into a fetal position, closed her eyes, and covered her nose, then opened her eyes slowly. In the hurricane of overlapping people, like a hundred movies being projected in the room at once, all of which had the volume turned up high, she suddenly singled out one man, in chains, sitting on the floor next to her. He was dirty, and covered with scabs and open sores. His hair crawled with lice. She could hear screams, and she forced her eyes away from the man in chains to another man, dressed in rags, who was, Sarah realized in horror, holding down a young girl and raping her. Jesus Christ! Sarah leapt on him and tried to pull him off, her own shouts mixing with those of the girl, but she merely fell through him to the floor, getting an electric shock in the process, and found herself eye to eye with a small child in a pressed white shirt and shorts, holding a teddy bear and whimpering. Superimposed over the child came a lurching pair of people making love, laughing, and over them a group of Nazi soldiers, sodomizing a young boy in a torn blue shirt who screamed in agony. When his screams became too loud, they shot him, and Sarah recoiled as he fell through her open arms and landed in a tangle of bloody limbs at her feet, his eyes staring up into hers. Though he was weightless, she could feel the energy of his body as it passed through hers, smell his urine, hear his heart stop beating.

  It was hard to find the walls; the room now had strange, unfamiliar edges. She saw the rough outlines of a dungeon, the heaped-up stores of a root cellar, huge piles of wine bottles, and the smooth gray cement of a bomb shelter. She gasped as a lion wandered past, then she tripped over what must be her own bed and fell, hitting her head on the all-too-real bedpost.

  Sarah sat on the floor, head throbbing, as water gushed into the room, rising quickly. She tried to swim but couldn’t feel the resistance of the water, and watched in disbelief as several people drowned in front of her, their hands reaching through her chest and face, grasping for life. She felt their energy envelop her, like waves of sonar.

  “Make it stop!” she screamed, as all around her people writhed, died, gave birth, had sex, suffocated, and strangled one another. It was a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, and she couldn’t escape it.

  Sarah told herself again it was the drug, but how long would this madness last? Maybe it would never wear off, and she would be trapped in this panic, this melee of humanity, forever. She tried to find the door handle to escape, but she was turning in circles, trapped in a lightning storm.

  Finally she made it out into the corridor, but once there she couldn’t find her way—it was as if several basements and dungeons and wine cellars and passageways and grave sites were piled up all around her. A silver casket was being lowered into a grave as a woman shrieked with grief, someone was being lashed with a whip, and a man was lying on the floor drunk. She smelled shit, and offal, and rotting flesh. otta woShe began to retch.

  Her heart was pounding faster and faster and she realized she was going to die, the atoms of her being would explode, forced apart by all the energy streaming through them.

  “Sarah,” called a faraway voice, and suddenly Shuziko was there, looking into her face and trying to talk to her, asking her what was wrong, should she call an ambulance. Sarah tried to talk, but bodies kept imposing themselves between them, people stretched on a rack, someone being burned with a flaming iron. For a moment Sarah glimpsed someone in modern dress and, hoping it was Suzi, she reached out her hand to grab the woman and felt nothing but charged air.

  “Sarah.” Suzi’s voice was calling her. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

  Her brain and body overloaded with electricity, Sarah started to have a seizure. And then Max was there, pushing Suzi aside. Sarah felt a sharp, violent jolt as Max gathered her up in his arms and shouted at Suzi to open the doors, to help him get her upstairs.

  “It was a dungeon,” he was shouting. “It was a fucking dungeon down here. We’ve got to get her out.”

  Sarah buried her face in Max’s chest. It felt good to be limp. There was a part of her that was saying, “You’re Sarah Weston, no one carries you anywhere,” but his smell was so good compared to the stench of the basement, a thousand years of mold and blood and pain and rot. She closed a hand around his shirt and touched the reality of the rough cotton, his muscles moving underneath. She felt like she could feel the blood flowing in his veins, the cells dividing, the neurons firing. As if she had microscopic vision and telescopic vision and X-ray vision all at the same time.

  Max carried her up several flights of stairs, Suzi just ahead, opening doors, keeping Sarah’s feet from banging against things.

  “Why aren’t we calling an ambulance?” she demanded.

  “She’ll be okay,” said Max. “She just needs to be in a happier place.”

  “Where? Disneyland?” snapped Suzi. “You’re a lunatic, I don’t know why I’m listening to you.”

  “The drug,” moaned Sarah.

  “What drug?” said Suzi. “I’ve dropped acid and this is the worst acid trip I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’s okay,” said Max. Sarah could feel him stop moving, and once again the energy pressed on her from all sides, though it was less frantic. “You can go now,” he said to Suzi. “She’ll be okay.”

  “I am not leaving,” Suzi said.

  “Sarah, keep your eyes closed,” Max whispered, depositing her on a low sofa. The fabric bristled under her skin. She could feel Max’s breath on her cheek. After all the horrors this was such a sensual, caressing sensation that she felt she might cry, or scream, or have an orgasm.

  “Before you open your eyes,” Max instructed, “listen. Hear the music. Try to find the sound of a cello and then follow it.”

  Still keeping her eyes tightly shut, Sarah realized she could, in fact, hear several orchestras playing at once. She concentrated, trying to separate one sound from all the others.

  <.At last she found it. A cello. Bach. The Cello Suite No. 1. She knew it like the beating of her own heart. As she focused on the familiar notes, ignoring the cacophony of other sounds, suddenly the smells, too, began to separate into distinctive threads and she could distinguish candles, and perfume. And fish. She slowly opened her eyes. It was hot, and smoky. Blurred figures swam before her, overlapping with one another. Figures seated at a table, listening.

  “What do you see?” asked Max.

  “People at a dinner party,” Sarah muttered. “I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

  Sarah shut her eyes again and tried not to swoon as the energy of the music flowed through her.

  “It’s okay. Follow the music. And when you’re ready, try focusing on the people listening to the music,” said Max. Sarah imagined the energy of the Bach as a single thread, and followed it through the tangle of sound in the room. Cautiously, she opened her eyes and found herself surrounded by people wearing clothes from what she guessed was the early nineteenth centu
ry. Men in long jackets and tight satin knee pants, women in low-necked, high-waisted dresses with clusters of curls about their ears. When she focused, it didn’t hurt as much to watch them. Rather than being hit with a firehose of sensation, it was like a shower. She could still see Max and Suzi, faintly. Max was watching her intently, and Suzi looked concerned.

  “You okay, Sugar?” Suzi asked.

  “I can see them,” said Sarah. “They’re having dinner.” She ducked as a waiter went by with a tray of small roast birds.

  Max put his arms around her and guided her toward the table. “Who’s the man in the third chair?” he asked her.

  Sarah carefully made her way so that she was standing behind the third chair. She realized that the same furniture was there in the past and present. In the present, where Max and Suzi were, the chair she was looking at was old, the upholstery of the seat was ripped, and the paint was flaking off. In the present of her vision, the chair was freshly painted and new-looking.

  Sarah reached down and touched the back of the chair, relieved that she could feel something solid under her fingers.

  “Look at the man in the chair,” repeated Max.

  The man had thick dark hair and was wearing a black wool coat. His high white collar was stained at the lapels. A red cravat circled his throat.

  She felt strange, staring at someone who was right in front of her. The man was talking to the woman next to him, and shoveling food unceremoniously into his mouth. Suddenly he turned to quaff his wine and she came face-to-face with him.

  “It’s Beethoven,” she said.

  She could hardly say his name. It was crazy, it was impossible. But it was Ludwig van Beethoven. She’d been staring at the bust of him on her desk for years. Her stomach flipped over and it was hard to breathe again. It’s a vision, she told herself, it’s only a vision.

  “Beethoven?” Suzi asked. “What the—?”

  Max nodded and shushed her. “What’s he doingt B?” he asked softly.