The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  “We could wait for them,” Eli said. “But I don’t want to. Do you? Be honest.”

  “You know everything about every major Czech monument, right? Inhumane parental brainwashing and all?”

  “What’s your point?” But he looked like he already knew—and that’s when I knew I was right.

  “The clock is the most famous monument in the city, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. One of them. So?”

  “So you knew about the war damage already, didn’t you? And you let them go on a wild-goose chase.”

  “Does it matter?” Eli said. “He clearly wasn’t in the mood to listen. To either of us.”

  “It matters.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll go to Strahov myself—”

  “And use your irresistible charm to get them to hand over their rare books to some random stranger with scissors?” Max would hate it if I let Eli go after the clue himself, I thought, knowing I was rationalizing. Knowing what I was going to do.

  Max had said it himself: Why stay together? He would forgive me for leaving without him, then I would forgive him for leaving without me. We were getting good at apologies. “Let’s go.”

  “Tell the truth: Was it my inescapable logic or my irresistible charm?”

  “Maybe we should try not to talk,” I said.

  “Ah, your words say you hate me, but your face says …” He narrowed his eyes and gave me an exaggerated once-over.

  “Yes?”

  “You hate me.” He shrugged. “At least you’re consistent. So, we go?”

  I hated to let him think he’d goaded me into it. But there was no reason to wait. “We go.”

  This time, at least, we left a note.

  33

  “Sorry we’re late,” Eli told the old man in the Strahov ticket booth. “I know we were told to arrive fifteen minutes before our appointment, but—”

  “Don’t apologize to him,” I snapped. “It’s his stupid city that made us late, all these one-way streets and pedestrian zones. What kind of Podunk, backward—”

  “It’s not his fault, honey,” Eli said. He rubbed my back. I glared, and he abruptly withdrew his hand. “Look, sir, as you can see, we’re in a hurry, so if you can just direct us to the library, we’ll get going.”

  “The library?” he said, with only the hint of an accent. “But this is off-limits to the public.”

  I scowled at him, then addressed Eli in a loud stage whisper. “The public? Tell me he did not just refer to us as ‘the public.’ ”

  “I’m so sorry,” Eli said. “She’s a little—”

  “Don’t you dare apologize for me.”

  “Sorry, sweetie.”

  “Stop apologizing and fix this!”

  Eli stared helplessly at the ticket seller.

  I rolled my eyes. “Look, Mr. Monk—”

  “I’m only a volunteer,” the man said.

  “Right, whatever. Look, I’m sorry if your library is, like, a state secret or something, but my father made us this appointment and you do not want to disappoint my father, okay?”

  “Maybe if there’s someone we could talk to about this?” Eli said. “Your boss, perhaps?”

  I snickered. “God’s probably busy, sweetie.”

  The man looked extremely uncomfortable. “Give me a moment.” He disappeared into some back room.

  “You’re alarmingly good at acting the bitch,” Eli whispered. “It suggests practice.”

  “And you’re alarmingly good at acting whipped,” I shot back. “Food for thought.”

  A door at the end of the narrow corridor swung open, and a round man in a long white tunic emerged. His bald head was the same rosy pink as his cheeks; his eyes were cold. “Dobrý den,” he said, his accent a weird mixture of Czech and British. “I am told of a problem?”

  I forced my hands to remain still at my sides, and tried not to stare too openly at his freshly pressed scapular. It was one thing to lie to a ticket vendor; it was another to lie to a monk.

  Good cause, I reminded myself. Presumably even his God would approve.

  “We’ve got an appointment to view some of the items in your rare-book collection,” Eli said. “But there seems to have been some kind of miscommunication.”

  “Your names?”

  “Jack Brown and Ella Weston,” I said.

  Eli curled an arm around me. “Soon to be Ella Brown, right?” He grinned at the monk. “We’re engaged.”

  I shrugged him off. “I told you, I’m keeping my name.”

  “You said we could talk about it—”

  “No, you said that. You know Daddy would never stand for it.”

  “And whatever Daddy says goes, right? Never mind that I’m going to be your husband—”

  “Not if you keep acting like a child.”

  “Me?”

  The monk cleared his throat. “We have no record of your appointment, and the library holdings are strictly off-limits to the public unless arrangements have been made.”

  “What is it with you people?” I said. “We are not ‘the public.’ My father is—”

  “They don’t need to know who your father is, honey.”

  “It’ll be his name on the check, won’t it?”

  “I will handle this,” Eli said firmly.

  I gave him a regal nod. “So, handle it.”

  “Here’s the situation,” he told the monk. “Ella and I, it was love at first sight—we were taking this astronomy class, and when I saw her … it was like, bam, I saw stars, you know?”

  “He doesn’t need to hear this,” I said.

  “He needs to know why this is so important, honey. So, that was two years ago, and now we’re engaged, and to celebrate—”

  “This is going to sound totally geektastic,” I told the monk.

  “It’s romantic,” Eli said. “I’m taking Ella around the world to see the most famous astronomical manuscripts. Because that’s how we fell in love.”

  “Well, technically, Daddy is the one taking us around the world. At least, his credit card is.”

  Eli sucked in his cheeks. “Her father is helping us out. Which was surprising, considering he hates me—”

  “He does not!”

  “And he claims he made us an appointment to see your first-edition Keplers.”

  “ ‘Claims’? Are you suggesting Daddy lied?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done something to humiliate me.”

  “Paranoid much?”

  “What about Turkey? And the library in St. Petersburg?”

  “You can’t blame him for that disaster in Turkey. And St. Petersburg admitted it was their mistake, and so Daddy says construction on the Ella Weston Wing will go forward as planned.”

  “That’s how he gets people to do what he wants,” Eli explained to the monk. “He throws money at them. I told him Church officials couldn’t be bribed, but …”

  “Daddy says anyone will do anything if the price is right,” I said.

  “You want to tell him when he said that most recently?” Eli said.

  “Daddy apologized for that.”

  “He tried to pay me off,” Eli said. “Ten thousand dollars if I’d break up with his daughter. It was disgusting.”

  “It was a test, sweetie. Don’t worry, you passed.” I turned to the monk. “He just wants what’s best for me.”

  “He wants you to marry someone from a more appropriate dynasty,” Eli spit out. “He wants to pimp you out like you’re some broodmare horny for a stud—excuse me, Brother.”

  The monk, whose bald head had gone from pink to a deep rose red, looked excruciatingly uncomfortable. “Perhaps the young lady could have her father call the abbot,” he suggested.

  “I guess that’s what we’ll have to do,” I said. “I didn’t want to see the stupid books anyway. This whole trip is his idea, you know. I’m just going along with it to be nice.”

  “You said you wanted to!”

  “That’s called nice
. Come on, we’ll call Daddy from the hotel, and—”

  “No!” Eli rifled through my bag and pulled out the phrasebook, flipping through it furiously. Then he grabbed the monk’s shoulders and, in halting, mispronounced Czech, said, “Posílá mě otec Hájek. Hrajte dál.”

  The monk raised his eyebrows. “Your Czech is terrible,” he said. “But your words are convincing. Come.”

  He marched us down the corridor and up a narrow staircase. We fell a few steps behind. “What did you say to him?” I whispered. The Czech hadn’t been part of the plan.

  “ ‘Please, in the name of love, help me to be a man,’ ” Eli said.

  “You’re joking.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” Then, raising his voice for the monk to hear, “I told you I would handle it. Aren’t you going to thank me?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I was thinking a kiss.”

  The monk turned back to us with an encouraging smile, as if eager to witness young love in action, although it was hard to believe our little show had evoked anything in him but a recommitment to celibacy.

  “We’re in a monastery,” I told Eli, with all the Ella Weston ice I could muster. “Have some respect for the Lord.”

  34

  To reach the library, we had to pass through a vaulted entry hall lined with glass cabinets, their shelves holding an array of sea-shells; impaled insects arranged by species, two by two by two; polished arrowheads; dead butterflies; rag dolls playing miniature violins; taxidermied eels and sharks and lobsters; a giant turtle with the face of a pterodactyl; a chain-mail shirt draped over a large wooden cross. There was also—its 2007 label suggesting that someone in the monastery had missed the memo on developing nations, political correctness, and the fact that living in a desert shouldn’t automatically qualify a person or his possessions for membership in a tastefully arranged freak show—a donkey whip from modern-day Kabul.

  “Kunstkammer,” I murmured, and the monk looked back in surprise. He nodded.

  “We collect,” he said. “We have always.”

  The stuffed sea creatures were staring at me, the insects were all too easy to imagine back to life, and the rag dolls were no less beady-eyed or more trustworthy than the rest of their kind. But it was the whip that chilled me the most.

  “Come.” The monk drew us into a long, narrow hall, its gilded wood paneling glowing in the warm light. The walls were lined with books, the curved ceiling layered with frescoes of the ancient Greek philosophers—everything about it screamed cathedral, but whatever was worshipped here, in this room, beneath the wild stares of Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Socrates, it wasn’t God. Or at least not the same God worshipped in the cathedral two stories below, with its barbed crosses and stained-glass Jesus. Not God alone.

  The monk settled us in velvet chairs pulled up to a sturdy wooden table, and, with a short, angry burst of Czech that apparently brooked no argument, sent a minion off in search of the first editions. They were delivered to us one by one—aging, mildewed volumes placed delicately on low wooden reading platforms, their covers a worn leather, their pages crammed with dense Latin text and complex astronomical engravings, planets dancing on geometrical orbits, mathematical equations littered with stars. The minion disappeared nearly as soon as he’d arrived, but the monk watched closely as we leafed through the pages, pretending to ooh and aah at regular intervals and, occasionally, reminiscing about the kooky dead astronomer who had first brought us together. He didn’t notice how carefully we ran our fingers over the binding, searching for bumps and bulges, telltale irregular stitching, any kind of sign that Elizabeth had been there before us.

  Johannes Kepler was, among other things, the imperial astronomer of Prague, the legendary natural philosopher who deciphered the laws of planetary orbits and transformed the Copernican system from an aesthetically pleasant diagram into a physical model of the universe, the author of the world’s first science-fiction novel, and the devout acolyte who dreamed of understanding God’s grand design and whose theories on the harmonies of the planetary spheres launched a thousand astrological crackpots. But in 1599, when Elizabeth and Thomas were running around Prague searching for sacred chalices and blessed dirt, he was an impoverished and henpecked nobody, toiling away in the hinterland, dreaming of a better life. He had, by that time, written one book, the Mysterium Cosmographicum, in which only the savviest minds of Europe saw what was to come. Strahov had three first editions in its collection, and in the third, I found a seam in the binding, just like the one in the Petrarch. To assuage any doubt, nine small letters were inscribed at the bottom of the second page:

  EIW

  IFW

  fsg

  It wasn’t a code. It was a greeting—the one she could never help herself from making. E. I. Westonia, Ioanni Francisco Westonio, fratri suo germano. That’s how sure she was that her brother would live long enough, and know her well enough, to retrieve what she had left behind. Because how could her fratri suo germano do anything less?

  Eli saw me see it. So he was ready.

  “I have to pee,” I said loudly. The monk flinched.

  Eli hunched over his copy of the book. “So pee,” he said.

  The monk cleared his throat. “Toilets are one flight down, second door on the left.”

  I tugged at Eli’s arm. “Well?”

  “I don’t have to go.”

  “But I do.”

  “Right. So go.”

  “By myself?”

  “You’re potty-trained.”

  “There’s, like, a crypt down there,” I said.

  “Like, seven floors down. I don’t think you need to worry.”

  “It’s dark. And I’ll get lost. Just come with me.”

  He looked up from the book, mouth set in a firm line, a boy who’d decided to wage his first fight as a man. “Sweetheart?”

  “Yes?”

  “Grow up.”

  I slapped the table. The monk jumped, hands twitching as if eager to snatch away the rare texts before I could seize one to throw across the room. “Why do you have to be so selfish?”

  Eli’s eyebrows nearly met his hairline. “Me?”

  “It’s always about what you want, what you need.”

  “Do I look like a mirror to you?”

  “What about last night?” I said, watching the monk. His bald pate was on fire.

  “What happened last night?”

  “How about what didn’t happen last night?” I said, voice rising. “There are two people in that bed, you know. And just because you’re satisfied doesn’t mean that I don’t need you to—”

  “I can escort you,” the monk said hastily.

  “Really? You’d do that?”

  He cleared his throat. “Of course.”

  “See, now that’s a gentleman,” I told Eli.

  He shrugged. “So marry him.”

  I hooked my arm through the monk’s and let him guide me out of the library, past the miniature Kunstkammer, and down the stairs to the bathroom, where I stalled inside for as long as I dared.

  When we returned, I could tell from the smile on Eli’s face that it had been long enough.

  35

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” Eli said as we descended toward Malá Strana, Elizabeth’s letter folded into his pocket. Strahov stood on a hill with the entire city stretched out beneath it. Several twisting paths cut through the grass, crisscrossing on their way back to civilization. We chose the steepest, away from the picnicking families and old men with grandchildren perched on their shoulders. “About getting you in trouble with Max. And being an ass about your brother.”

  “I’m not in trouble with Max.” We weren’t going to talk about my brother. “That’s not how we work.”

  “Right.”

  “And just for the record, there’s nothing nefarious going on with him and Adriane.”

  “I’m not worried about your little high school soap opera. He’s capable of worse.”

  �
�You can’t still think he had anything to do with Chris. After everything?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “If you really thought he was guilty, you’d call the cops,” I said. “You wouldn’t just be sitting around chatting with the guy who murdered your cousin.”

  “That’s very logical,” he said.

  “Which is why I don’t get why you treat him like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you hate him. You barely know him.”

  “I barely know you, too.”

  “Right, but you don’t act like you hate me,” I pointed out. “Most of the time, at least.”

  “No, I don’t. So, Logic Girl, maybe you’re asking the wrong question.”

  “So now I’m supposed to ask what the right question is. And let me guess, you tell me that’s for you to know and me to find out? Sorry, I’m not playing this game.”

  “You’re not playing any game,” he said. “That’s what’s going to get you in trouble.”

  “Trouble with what?”

  “Forget it.” He walked faster, kicking off small avalanches of gravel with each heavy step. I hurried to catch up, scuttling down the hill in mincing baby steps, feeling the potential for a disastrous skid every time my foot touched the ground.

  “I’m already in trouble. In case you haven’t noticed.”

  “I said forget it.”

  “Why are you like this?”

  “All I wanted to say was sorry,” he said. “About Andy. I get it now.”

  “What?”

  “Why you can’t let yourself believe in all this. Why you need the Lumen Dei not to be real.”

  “I thought I was pretty clear I can’t believe in it because it’s ridiculous and because there’s no such thing as—”

  “God. You were clear,” he said. “Because if there were a God, he took your brother away. He took Chris away. What would you want with a God like that? But if there were a machine—a miracle—that could prove you were wrong, you’d be stuck with him. And you’d have to ask why he took them.”

  “You think that scares me?”

  “I think you’re afraid to believe there’s something out there that wants to take everything you love away from you. And maybe … afraid to hope that with the Lumen Dei, with the power it’s supposed to confer, maybe you could bring them back.”