Two hours later, the phone rang. It was George. “I will not be able to come see you this evening,” he apologized. “I am here with some colleagues discussing points from the papers earlier today. There were some papers I was particularly interested in that I was not able to attend, given the concurrent sessions of both the Evil and the Monsters conferences. So we are catching up on papers that we each missed and debating some of the points that were not well argued. At least, not well-enough argued.”
Magdalena could hear conversation and laughter in the background. There was the clinking of glasses and the busy hum of what she assumed was the hotel bar where he was staying. “I… I understand.” Magdalena bit her lip to keep from lashing out in bitter disappointment. What could she say to keep him on the phone, to hear his voice for another few minutes?
“I had the strangest experience this evening,” she blurted out, unaware that she had decided to use this story to keep George on the phone. “I was coming home and ran into Professor Thomlinson on my block. I think he climbed up to the castle this afternoon and hadn’t realized how much of an exertion it would be for someone his age and weight. He looked nearly ready to have a heart attack. So I invited him in to sit and have a glass of water. I had to freshen up after walking home from work and left him alone in the room for less than a minute. But when I came back out into the kitchen, he was gone. Poof! Just like that.” Magdalena paused. There was no response on the other end of the phone. She wasn’t sure George was listening to her.
“It was about half an hour or forty-five minutes after he left,” she went on. “It was then that I realized he had taken the silver goblet with him. My chalice. The chalice we used to invoke the judgment deserved by those who burned Fen’ka.”
There was an instantaneous change to the quality of the silence on the other end of the phone. There was rapt attention now and Magdalena could imagine the furrows in George’s brow as he heard her tale. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” she asked. “Why would he do that? Surely he can’t think that it is valuable. But….” A new thought struck her. “Does it seem dangerous?”
Magdalena could hear George breathing into the phone’s receiver, perhaps considering the possibilities. Maybe now he would come to see her. Maybe he would need to discuss this development in person.
“Dangerous?” he finally responded in as serious a tone as she had ever heard him use. “I suspect not. But definitely worrisome.” There was another pause.
“I will deal with it,” he promised her. “I will look into it later this evening and inquire of Professor Thomlinson what he found so irresistible about the chalice. I will let you know in the morning the result of my investigation.”
“Are you sure? Will you be able to speak with him this evening?” Magdalena pressed him. “Do you know whether he is staying in the same hotel as you?”
“I… I am not sure.” George sounded distracted. Or was he irritated? Magdalena wasn’t sure. The connection was cut off and a dial tone filled the emptiness.
Magdalena fought the impulse to burst into tears. She wanted to run into the night, to find the hotel where George was staying and to join him in the bar there. But that would look strange. A secretary joining the conference participants for drinks in the hotel bar? There would be no way to explain her presence as mere happenstance. Whoever George was with would know she had come there to join them. They might not realize it was to join George, but it would still strike them as odd. George would be embarrassed. Would he be so embarrassed that he would stop speaking to her?
It was not worth risking that. She blew out the candle stub and slunk to her bedroom. At least the romance novel waited on her nightstand to keep her company in the darkness.
In the hotel bar, George stared at the phone before dialing his next call. He had almost decided to not call Magdalena, to not warn her that he would not be coming to see her. It was a good thing he had gone against his instinct to leave her waiting in the night and had spoken with her. How else would he have discovered this important development?
He dialed the next number. No one answered, so he left a message to contact him immediately. “I will be in the hotel bar,” he added at the end. “Find me there if I have not yet returned to my room.”
The next morning, Peter came down to breakfast early. In all the excitement yesterday, he had forgotten that he was scheduled to give his paper at the first conference session this morning. In the middle of the night, when he recalled this, he had decided to rise early, eat quickly, and then walk over to the Angel House to put the finishing touches on his paper. He had his briefcase with him in the dining room and replaced his notes into it as he finished reviewing them over his hard-boiled eggs and coffee. He was about to stand when Elizabeth, the Irishwoman at the Monsters conference, came up to him.
“Professor Thomlinson!” She shook his hand excitedly. “I was so sorry that you were not able to attend the Monsters session on the undead yesterday afternoon. I was hoping to hear your reaction to my paper on the Dearg-due, an Irish kind of vampire. I am interested to hear how you think it compares to the Romanian vampires you have been researching in Brasov.”
“Ah, well, yes,” he replied. “I was hoping to hear the papers in that session. But unfortunately, I was caught up in some other sessions and unable to attend everything I was interested in,” he lied. “Perhaps we can talk again later? I am just heading over to the Angel House to prepare for my paper this morning.” Unexpectedly, he felt a pulsing in his groin that surprised him with its ferocity.
“Really?” Elizabeth asked. “Perhaps we could walk together and I could give you a brief synopsis of my paper and you could share some thoughts with me?”
There seemed little danger in that. She could not have any interest in the chalice he had taken from Magdalena. Besides, Elizabeth was a beautiful young woman and he would be happy to share her company—and her interests in various vampiric creatures—on the walk across the river. He took a deep breath to calm himself. He took his briefcase in one hand and Elizabeth reached out to wrap her arm around his other elbow. Startled by her gesture of familiarity, he stepped out of the hotel with her and headed toward the Charles Bridge. Elizabeth began to give him a brief review of the history of the Dearg-due, but as they neared the bridge, she pulled him away from it and towards the park on the other side.
“This way, Professor Thomlinson,” she urged. “The next bridge down the river actually brings us much closer to the Angel House and avoids that long walk through the Old Town to get there.”
“Are you sure?” Peter asked. It seemed wrong, somehow, but his grasp of the city’s geography was unsteady enough that he felt no confidence in debating it. Besides, the chance to spend a few extra moments in her company, walking arm in arm, seemed to drive all other thoughts from his mind. He wondered if she might want to have a drink together later.
Sophia had gotten up early to take her morning exercise walk along the river. She had gone out the hotel and paused at the Charles Bridge. Instead of crossing the bridge, which she’d seen several times already, she decided to turn towards the park called the Kampa.
“I am certain that this is a more direct route to the conference,” Elizabeth promised Peter. “I discovered it yesterday, but it makes an amazing difference in the length of the walk.”
“Very well! To the next bridge, then!” Peter wondered at Elizabeth’s seemingly intense, sudden interest in cultivating his friendship. Was she hoping he would write her a recommendation? Did she want to come to Romania to study the vampires of Eastern Europe so as to compare them with the Irish sort? He couldn’t imagine that she did not want something from him. But it did not matter. He would be happy to give her what she wanted. He only hoped that she did not notice the quickly growing tent of his trousers.
They entered the Kampa park and began walking away from the Little Town, towards the next bridge. Elizabeth kept talking on, quickly, about the vampire-woman of Waterford, her hometown.
�
��You know, Professor Thomlinson, that Waterford crystal is as famous as the Bohemian crystal on sale here in Prague?” she asked. The conversation seemed poised to go off on an irrelevant tangent.
He sputtered something in response and tried to withdraw his arm from her grasp, but she was holding him too firmly.
Sophia had briskly walked the length of the park and had turned back to the hotel. She was following another walkway that brought her closer to the edge of the park bordered by a small creek that flowed along for some distance before rejoining the river. She could still see the river’s edge across the park, however, and hear its rushing stream distinct from the creek beside her. She paused to watch the slow revolution of a creaking waterwheel in the stream.
“You think you’re so clever, don’t you?” Elizabeth hissed at Peter out of the corner of her mouth, refusing to let go of his arm. “You think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”
He looked at her, taken aback by the poison in her tone, fear mingling with his unexpected desire for her. He saw hatred flash across her face, replaced as suddenly by a placid mask. He tried again to pull his arm from her grasp, but her grip tightened even more, pulling his large body more solidly against hers. She led him further down the path, away from the Charles Bridge.
“Don’t shout. Don’t make any sudden moves; you really don’t want to attract any attention here, do you?” she asked quietly, intently looking straight ahead.
He had no idea what she had in mind. He was suddenly very frightened of her. Did she have a gun in her shoulder bag? What could she possibly be planning? Was she leading him towards a rendezvous with some accomplice? He had thought there was little danger walking with her in public to the conference to discuss a common academic interest, but maybe he had made a huge, tragic miscalculation. Although there were few people in the park on this overcast weekday morning, he thought it better for the moment not to antagonize her and to follow her lead.
“We really can’t have you snooping around like you’ve been,” she said, breaking the silence. “What made you think we wouldn’t notice?”
He gasped for breath and fumbled to formulate a response.
Sophia turned away from the waterwheel to resume her walk.
“Is that Peter there… with that Irish redhead?” she wondered. She thought she recognized the two people across the park, standing next to the river’s edge, but she could not be sure. The distance was too great.
“Should I call out a greeting?” She raised her hand uncertainly to wave. The redhead must be the Irish professor she had seen at the conferences. But was that Peter? She was about to call out but the words caught in her throat. Then she nearly screamed, clapped her hand over her mouth, and hurried as quickly as she could back to the hotel.
“Ah, there it is.” Elizabeth seemed to see something along the edge of the path that she had evidently been looking for. She let his arm go and bent over to pick a scraggly clump of weeds growing along the edge of the walkway.
“Elizabeth, I never dreamed you were caught up in all this,” he began, unsure of how much to reveal. How was she tied up with this business of George and Magdalena? Hadn’t Magdalena’s friend said that Magdalena had told her that there was another woman involved in the plot? He had forgotten that piece of information until this very minute. It was all too complicated to remember all the details. Was George waiting for them further along the path? Was that why she had steered him away from the Charles Bridge and through this park?
“Well, it really doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” she asked sweetly, turning to face him. “It doesn’t matter what you know or what you suspect, because you’re no longer in a position to threaten us. You’re no longer in a position to tell anyone. You should just be glad that we are letting you get away at all.”
She held the weeds in her hands, large pods hanging limply from the stalks she had picked. She cracked the pods open, revealing their downy contents. She held them gently in her hands to protect them from drifting away and then brought her palms to her lips, whispered something, and blew.
A cloud of tiny seeds swirled out of the pods and hovered in the air before settling on his shoulders and the front of his jacket. His sharp intake of breath, a reaction to the surprise of her blowing the seeds and dust into his face, pulled many of the pungent, mite-sized particles deep into his lungs. He coughed.
“Give it a moment,” she told him. “I’m sorry, though, Peter, that this was necessary.” He stared at her, frightened and perplexed. Give what a moment?
His startled cry of amazement caught in the thickening phlegm of his throat, constricting his airway. He felt sick to his stomach. Muscles swelled, tightening in his limbs, while his suddenly enlarged tongue searched for room to contain itself in his mouth. Throwing up his hands to protect himself from he knew not what, he saw the skin mottle and blister. The earth hurtled towards his face and he was unable to resist the compulsion to jump away from whatever was tormenting him on his now powerful legs.
She picked up the tangle of Peter’s discarded clothes and tied them into a bundle that she threw into the water. She opened the briefcase and scattered the papers in it along the riverbank and tossed the open briefcase itself into the water as well. Then she turned to walk briskly back towards the bridge.
None of the few people in the park seemed to notice the large, squat toad hop toward the muddy riverbank near the place Elizabeth had thrown the body of the Turk into the river.
“Curse them eating and drinking!”
(Epiphany 1357)
J
an stood near the burning pyre in the Old Town Square on that September afternoon. He had heard all the excitement of the mob as it moved toward the river, bringing the old woman to be dunked and tested for witchcraft. He had stepped into the street and been swept up in the hysteria and now found himself, through the jostling and pushing of the mob, near the stake.
He heard the old woman curse the crowd who burnt her. She cursed them in the castle and in the four towns. She cursed them going out and coming in. She called on Svetovit to make the sky brass, to cause them to lose what they had, to make their feasts into traps. Then lightning struck the square as the soldiers came running—too late!—to stop the mob.
Jan had run, run away from the lightning, away from the curse. He had run for his life with the rest of the crowd. When he finally got back home, he told his wife everything that had happened. She clucked and shook her head in dismay.
“Why would you go get involved with all that witchery?” she demanded. “As soon as you saw what it was all about, you should have come straight home and stayed as far away from her as you could!” she insisted. “What have you brought upon us, Jan Čapek? What have you brought upon us?”
Ivana, one of the serving girls at the inn, was scrubbing the floor, kneeling amid the soap suds and exhausting herself as she swept the brush back and forth across the stones. The repeated immersions of the brush into her bucket caused her hands to redden and wrinkle; the harsh homemade soap chafed and bit into her hands as much as the splinters from the brush’s wooden handle did. She bit her lip in frustration.
No matter how often she scrubbed, the floor always seemed dirty. Now that it was winter, almost Christmas, the guests of the inn were constantly bringing in muddy snow on their boots. Every evening she served dinner to the guests and every morning she scrubbed the floor for the innkeeper. The innkeeper, Jan Čapek, tried to be a good man, but between the demands of his wife, his guests, his children and just about everyone else in town, he was often short-tempered and difficult to bear. His expectations of his staff were erratic and he seemed to want them all to know what he wanted them to do before he knew himself.
The inn stood where it had for more than one hundred years. It was the most popular inn in the Little Town, just up the street from the bridge on the route leading up the hill to the castle. The dining room was a few steps down from the street level, making it easy for the melting snow to trickle i
n and the tramping feet of the passersby to churn the slush on the floor as they came in for a cup of grog or a bowl of stew. The rooms above were always full, too, providing plenty of laundry for Ivana to wash each day after she had finished scrubbing the floor.
In addition to Ivana, the innkeeper had Michael the cook and his kitchen apprentice David as well as another serving girl, Susanna. Ivana and Susanna were at the age when most girls were wed. Their families, who lived on the edge of the Little Town, had arranged for them to work at the inn until suitable marriages could be arranged. Although they were both considered pretty and had laughed easily before coming to work at the inn, they were rapidly becoming the last girls in their circle of friends to marry. Ivana had hopes that David, the apprentice cook, would ask her father for her hand but wasn’t sure David would ever get to asking. He was always cutting, chopping or stirring something in the kitchen. Or he was ducking the large hands of Michael, who was eager to box the ears of his apprentice for the smallest of infractions.
As an apprentice, David lived in one of the smaller rooms on the inn’s top floor—as Ivana and Susanna did. But because there was only one of him, he had the room to himself. If he were to wed Ivana, though, she would be able to move out of the small room she shared with Susanna and move across the hall to share David’s room. Eventually they would be able to move to one of the larger rooms downstairs or even out of the inn altogether. Ivana had their future all planned.
There never seemed an end to the work at the inn and never enough people to do it all. As Ivana moved across the floor of the common room with her scrubbing brush, she could hear the clatter of pots and pans behind the great doors that led into the kitchen. She could hear the guests stirring in their rooms upstairs as Susanna scrubbed the stairs leading up from the common room. She could also hear Jan’s wife scolding the children as they got dressed and ready to join the town waking up outside. Jan himself bustled out the door to get food at the market for his guests’ supper that night, muttering a harried good morning to Ivana and Susanna as he passed.
Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy Page 55