by Magnus Flyte
“So. I see.”
“Do you?” Miles voice was urgent, anxious. “What do you see?”
“I see that these are love letters,” Janek said, slowly. “From a woman to a man. The man is Russian; the woman, American. The man is evidently being very generous with objects of value, and the woman is being very generous with her body.”
“The dates—” Miles interrupted.
“Yes, the dates. Well, the dates tell us that these two did not find their passion impeded by the brutality around them. The dates tell us that it is less than a decade since the scent of the martyr Jan Palach’s scorched flesh hung in the air, as these two make arrangements for candlelit dinners. The dates tell us that Prague Spring is over and that our country is plunged into a winter that will last twenty-one years, but these two are not feeling the cold, no no.”
“The man, she addresses him as Yuri . . .”
“Yes, and it would seem that Yuri has access to many things. Many priceless things. And the woman, too, she has maybe access. What kind of ‘list’ would an American woman submit to a Russian man in 1978? Names, she is giving him names. And a man who is able to give a woman a jewel-encrusted cigarette case in Prague, in 1978, this man must be a powerful man indeed.”
“Janek?”
“Yuri Bespalov, it would seem,” Janek said, heavily. “Head of the National Museum. I knew him, slightly. Almost certainly KGB, of course. But Miles, you can hardly be shocked by this. You, of all people, who must riffle through the attics of Nazis, and who must search under the mattress of every grubby little communist minister and his mistress to find what has been stolen? Surely you are not shocked to discover that a Party member gave a few trinkets to a lover? What is it that disturbs you? That this American woman is almost certainly a CIA agent? And not, perhaps, the most loyal to the red, white, and blue?”
“She doesn’t say anything about—”
“She does not say, ‘It is so neat, I am a turncoat spook,’ no, I agree. She does not. Let us return to what we know. The receiver of these letters is called Yuri and he is important and in charge of a lot of precious objects and able to move freely in high political circles and provide much caviar and champagne and he is living in Lobkowicz Palace, which is coincidentally the same place that Yuri Bespalov resided during his tenure, but let us not make too many assumptions. We do not have a name for the writer of these letters. She signs herself in a variety of interesting ways. I like particularly the reference to her hot, wet, dripping—”
“Janek,” Miles snapped. “Stop playing games.”
The two men fell silent and Sarah waited tensely, trying to process what she was hearing. She could hear Pols’s voice in her ear, telling her to concentrate. Sarah thought of the woman—Stefania—whom she had just met. Stefania had said that it was an American woman who had pledged to help her. Possibly CIA. Names. The writer of the letters Miles and Janek were discussing had been giving names.
Once again Sarah locked eyes with Max, but he looked blankly back at her, shaking his head slightly. Sarah swallowed, then almost choked. Her eyes watered. Max clenched her hand, his eyes growing wide with alarm.
“You know who is the writer of these letters?” Janek was asking softly.
“I . . . I do yes. She is a very public and very powerful woman and she has been a friend to what we’re trying to accomplish here at the museum. Janek, believe me, when she first contacted me about—”
“Plon Pro">ease,” Janek said, his voice rising. “Do not tell me the identity. Do not place me in that position.”
“No, no, I’m sorry. I can’t . . . I won’t. Really I won’t. You’ve been through enough in your life, God knows. But I’m in over my head here, and you’re the only one I can trust.”
“Where did you find these letters?” Janek asked, his voice softening a little.
“I didn’t,” Miles said. “One of my researchers found them. Eleanor Roland. She got the mad idea that maybe the fireplace in her room was functioning and started investigating the flue. These letters fell out. She’s a good soul. She brought them straight to me.”
“Are you positive of this? I met this woman tonight. She is excitable, an enthusiast. Perhaps she held on to them for a few days? Read them? Discussed them with others?”
“Every person here is under strict orders to bring everything immediately to me,” Miles said. “From the beginning, I have insisted. Everything comes straight to me.”
“Really?” Janek replied, softly. “Is that so? That does seem wise, of course. Such a large collection. So much opportunity for . . . loss.”
There was another long pause. Sarah could hear more drinks being poured. Which made her dry throat ache. Her legs were strong, but the cramps were getting worse. Max, too, stuck in an even more uncomfortable position, looked like he was ready to topple over.
“How long have you had these papers?” Janek was asking now.
“A few days.”
“And you are going to return them? To the writer? Or is this what you want advice about? Because you feel, you know, that a wrong has been committed. Perhaps many wrongs. Perhaps these letters are only the beginnings of a very dark and very dirty tunnel.”
“Or not.” Miles sounded almost desperate.
“Or not. Perhaps they are just the love letters of two foolish people. We have all been foolish.”
“Janek?”
Sarah heard the sound of chair legs being scraped back, the thump of a glass upon the desk.
“I think,” the old man said, “that I have dedicated my life to the preservation of documents of evil. I think that there are crimes for which there is no proper punishment. I think—and this is an old man’s thought—that the less we have to accuse ourselves with, the less frightened we are of the place that awaits us all. I think those letters must get out of your possession very soon. I think that I do not wish to be involved. And now I think that I am finally tired, and should go to bed.”
“Forgive me,” Miles said. “I’m ashamed of myself. We didn’t . . . this conversation never happened. I don’t know . . . I don’t know what’s come over me lately.”
“Let us call it Prague,” Janek said, somberly. “It is a city of secrets and dark whisperings, my friend. Even you are not immune. You must think this over very carefully, but I cannot advise you. This is a matter for your conscience.”
More silence, then at last Miles’s voice, tired but resigned.
“I know what you are saying. Tomorrow, I will . . . well, tomorrow.” Sarah heard more chair squeakings and what sounded like the safe being shut. “I’ll let you out and then I have decisions to make.”
“Ah, yes. And tomorrow I will return to Nelahozeves and my hunt for the intrigues of some eminent dead people. You see, I am not immune either. But it is safer, I think, to read the love letters of those whose crimes are long forgotten. Ghosts, my friend, are very quiet.”
Sarah thought she might actually pass out, the relief was so great. Miles and Janek were leaving, they were walking out of the office! She and Max had not been caught!
She thought about what she had heard. An American woman, CIA, had an affair with KGB agent Yuri Bespalov in the 1970s, and had become a double agent herself. That woman, Miles had said, was now very public, very powerful, and “a friend to the museum.” And she was looking for the letters Eleanor had found.
“Miles said he was coming back,” Sarah whispered. “We need to get out of here.”
Max was already opening the closet door and pulling her with him. They sprinted down the hallway. They heard a door slam close by. Someone called out in Czech. Someone answered. Was that Miles’s voice? They ran down the stairs, almost falling, and sprinted down a passage. Max turned a corner, slipped down more steps, pulled her through an absurdly short door and into another hallway. Sarah had no clue what part of the palace they were in, until suddenly she realized they were in front of her own bedroom. Max opened her door and they fell
in, shutting the doo
r behind them and leaning against it, gasping for breath.
Sarah’s windowless room was even darker than the office.
“Are you okay?” Max wheezed.
Sarah shook her head, then realized he probably couldn’t see her.
“You?”
“I’m okay,” Max whispered. “What do we do now?”
“My goodness, what have you been up to?” said a familiar bassoon voice, from somewhere behind them in the room.
Sarah scrabbled around the wall till she found the light switch. Nicolas Pertusato was sitting cross-legged on Sarah’s bed. Even more disturbingly, he was wearing Sarah’s “Beethoven Rocks” T-shirt. Sarah shut her eyes. The little man was not wearing pants.
TWENTY-NINE
Calling him “Nicolas” felt a tad formal under the circumstances. “Nico,” hissed Sarah, “for God’s sake put some pants on.” She averted her eyes only after noticing that the tiny man had more than tiny parts. Rather largely-out-of-proportion parts, actually. No wonder his wife looked so happy. “And then you can explain what you’re doing here.”
“I would be happy to clothe myself,” said Nico with a grin, “except my hands are tied. Literally.” He nodded over his shoulder, and Max and Sarah looked sideways at each other.
“Rock paper scissors?” said Max.
Sarah gave Max a look. She tossed a towel over Nico’s exposed lower half and Max went over to the bed and began wrestling with the ropes that bound the little man’s hands to the bedstead.
“Mille grazie,” said Nico, flexing his arms and shoulders and pulling the towel around himself. “I’ll be troubling you no longer.”
“Uh-uh,” said Sarah, cringing at the thought of Nico’s junk on her pillow. “Explanation. Now. Or we’ll tie you back up again.”
“I could demand the same of you two. It’s almost three in the morning.”
“Talk,” said Sarah. Her tone made even Max sit up straighter.
“I was taking a bath,” said Nico. “Rather enjoying a nice long soak. You were so kind, Max, to give me a room to sleep in here for late nights although Oksana complains—”
“Cut to the chase,” said Max.
“Someone came into the bathroom. I said ‘occupato,’ but before I could turn around, whoever it was knocked me over the head. Look.”
Sarah and Max saw that Nico did indeed have a large purple goose egg on the back of his head. Sarah touched it and he flinched.
“It’s real,” he said crabbily.
“Don’t you lock the door when you take a bath?” asked Sarah.
“What’s the fun in that?” said Nico. “Anyway, I woke up here, naked and tied to the bed. Thanks to a summer in Siberia with a team of performing acrobats, I was able to maneuver my way into your T-shirt. I made a valiant effort to get into your pants, but they were out of reach. Now, what is your story?”
“We were out for a walk,” said Max. “Meteor shower.”
“You share so many of Tycho Brahe’s interests,” said the little man. “Though his dwarf was rather a sourpuss, I understand.”
“Could you tell anything about the person who hit you over the head?” asked Sarah, trying to suppress the vision of someone throwing a wet, naked, unconscious Nico over their shoulder and hauling him fireman-style all the way down here. “Male? Female?”
“Alas,” Nico said. “I know nothing. It is not often that I am taken by surprise. It’s actually quite thrilling. One gets so bored.”
“Why grab Nico and leave him here?” asked Sarah after they had sent Pertusato on his way.
Max shrugged. “A message? A warning? A joke, like the cross? No one would hear him scream from here. But they had to know you weren’t in your room.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Sarah agreed. “Earlier tonight someone locked me out on the roof. Someone got really tired of waiting for Nico to finish his bath and dumped him here. The same someone, or are we being invaded by a mischievous army?”
“Let’s focus on the letters,” said Max. “What’s all that CIA stuff?”
"Minion Sarah thought about the dancer Stefania, who’d had her legs crushed. And about Andy the spy. Spying for whom? The CIA? Or someone else? If he knew the letters were in Miles’s safe, then it seemed likely that his death was connected to those letters. And to whichever prominent ex-CIA agent was now hunting for them.
“Can you trust Max?”
Pols had asked. “Or are you just in love with him?”
“Did you tell Miles to fire me?”
Max looked shocked. Really shocked? It was hard to tell.
“Of course I didn’t,” he said. “You don’t think I would try to do that, do you?”
No. Maybe. No.
Except you lied about that letter from the Hotel Gritti Palace. And what’s between you and your cousin Elisa? And how is she wrapped up in all this?
Sarah shook her head, then looked over at him. “What were you hoping to find?” she asked. “In Miles’s safe?”
“Any clue as to what the hell is going on,” sighed Max, heading out the door. And once again, Sarah knew he was lying.
THIRTY
Sarah’s first move in the morning was to call Pols. Jose answered the phone.
“We’re exhausted,” he yawned. “All of a sudden, bam. Pols, she tell me she want to stay in hotel and practice. Me, I want the room service. But Boris no like anyone strange coming into room.”
“Perfect,” Sarah said. “I think Pols should rest as much as she can before the competition. We wouldn’t want anything . . . anything to go wrong.”
After all the talk of CIA spies roaming the palace, Sarah was now well and truly paranoid.
Is anyone listening to my phone? Do you hear me? You touch that kid and I will destroy you.
Magically, Jose seemed to pick up on her thoughts. His next words came loudly and with careful pronunciation.
“Oh yes, she want to practice and rest. Then we go to competition. Then we go home. Her mama and papa want to make sure that she safe and sound and get back to Boston right away. And I no want to upset such powerful people, of course.”
Not bad, Sarah thought. Pols’s parents weren’t especially powerful even among the bohemian trust fund set, but at least if someone was listening they would get the idea that the girl was only here to perform and leave.
“I wish she could see a little more of Prague,” Sarah sighed theatrically. “Well, not see, of course, but experience. She’s so interested in all the old history. She told me she had tried to look up something online about the American-Czech Cultural Alliance but her voice-activation thingy was screwing up and sending her to random sites.”
Work with me, Jose.
“Oh yes,” Jose sighed. “She complain about thish. We are not so good with computers, Pols and me. So we get book on Bohemia from library. Much better. Bye, Sarah. We call you later.”
• • •
Her anxiety about Pols’s Internet searches somewhat abated, Sarah slipped out to do a little searching of her own. She didn’t want the things she was looking for to show up on her own computer, using the palace server.
“Know where I can get Wi-Fi?” she asked the Sexy Stabber. When he failed to respond, she made her way down Thunovska and eventually found a funky restaurant with Miles Davis posters on the wall and a bank of computers.
Who was a prominent and powerful American woman who was ex-CIA and would have been in Prague in the 1970s? Superspy Robert Hanssen and feminist icon Gloria Steinem showed up when she googled that. Hanssen was out by gender, and Steinem’s time with the CIA was too early for 1978 hijinks.
Sarah sighed and listened to Miles Davis riff for a moment. Something else was in the back of her mind. Pols had said something about a photo of Elisa and Senator Charlotte Yates. Elisa wasn’t American, and anyway she was the wrong age. But Yates was certainly prominent. Could she be the Spy Who Loved Yuri? Feeling slightly ridiculous, she googled “Charlotte Yates.” There was the Wikipedia entry, the Senate
website, and a bunch of news items. Charlotte Yates had an honorary doctorate from Virginia Tech, had been various journals’ and organizations’ Woman of the Year (most recently the Ladies’ Home Journal Woman of the Year for upholding family values). She was unmarried and apparently considered something of a catch, except as the most powerful woman in the Senate she intimidated all potential lovers and needed a sexier haircut, according to Us Weekly. God, the press was horrific.
An article in Italian about the Venice poisoning caught Sarah’s eye. Charlotte Yates was mentioned in passing, something weird about black food. Fuoco was in the headline, which Sarah knew meant “fire.” She had Google translate the article for her, which was an imperfect science. “People dead gondolier say yell fire,” said the article, or rather the computerized translation. Sarah was startled to see there was a quote from someone referred to informally as La Lobkowicz, who was crying tears of relief that she had left the party early. Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti. Max’s cousin. So she had been at the event.
Sarah clicked on another article about the poisoning, this one in English. Senator Charlotte Yates had accompanied home the body of a prominent American who had been killed in the terrorist poisoning at the fund-raiser in Venice. Al Qaeda had taken credit for the attack. Yates of course denounced their brutality and called for those on the side of right around the world to rise against them.
Sarah could find no photograph showing Charlotte Yates and Elisa together, and no connection between them at all, although she did find the same site that Pols had found, saying that the senator served on the board of the American-Czech Cultural Alliance . . . the board that had been influential in working with the Czech government during the restitution process. A board that Marchesa Elisa Lobkowicz DeBenedetti would have had a great interest in influencing.