The Prague Sonata

by Bradford Morrow

  III

  Eternity depends on whether people are willing to take care of something.

  —Werner Herzog

  1

  JÁNSKÁ AT NIGHT is the darkest, most taciturn street in Malá Strana. A few unshuttered amber windows look out over the pitched cobblestone lane, but its feeble streetlamp has little to offer. A boy or girl could skip down the narrow lane from end to end in less than half a minute. Wide enough for just one car to travel, and yet it’s a world unto itself. In daylight, Jánská is as beautiful as a film set—the set for an old movie about war, love, loss, pursuit, betrayal, maybe hope. Or a classic Prague tale by Jan Neruda himself. At night, though, it truly comes into its own, flowering like some forbidden black orchid. Only the rarest cinematographer could capture its spectral glow. Nerudova, one of the quarter’s busiest thoroughfares, may be just a block over, but standing alone in front of Jánská 12 one might never suspect other streets existed. And tonight, in a way, they didn’t.

  Petr Wittmann stood alone, an elegant ghost of sorts in his dark gray herringbone greatcoat, before the Hodeks’ door at that very Jánská 12. In the purple dark he loitered, looking back down the brief empty street. He took a few steps away from the house and saw that the windows on the top floor were still unilluminated. Furtive, his mind stretching in conflicted directions, he had spent his evening walking up and down the Jánská sidewalk of gray and white mosaic stone, and along neighboring streets, in silent negotiation with himself. The American who lived in the attic apartment showed no sign of life. Whereas others, moving behind their windows above the alley, had turned on lights, made dinner and eaten, sat before televisions or in favorite chairs to read before retiring, he had not. How Petr Wittmann wished he had not stopped smoking, on his doctor’s recommendation, the year before. If he had an honest unfiltered cigarette and match on him, the hard work he had done to abstain would suddenly come to nothing, yes, but he would certainly feel better.

  Did he really propose to push matters this far? Could he even pull it off? He could, surely. Nor did it hurt that he felt himself to be fundamentally in the right. Should such an important manuscript be relegated to an inexperienced young lady and her sideshow smattering of half-cocked Nazi sympathizers, retired professors, earnest piano teachers, aspiring writers, and the rest of Miss Tavener’s fond, foolish band? No way could he stand by and watch such amateurs proceed in ignorance of what they held in their hapless hands.

  He caught himself chewing one of his fingernails. Ridiculous. He had maneuvered serenely through the riddlesome networks of Communist rule, staying above the fray and ahead of its bald and besotted gatekeepers at every pass, and now he was gnawing on his nails like a schoolgirl? He quietly cursed himself. He’d hesitated long enough. The time had come to make his move.

  Earlier in the evening a woman had opened the door to Jánská 12 and disappeared inside the building. Wittmann, who’d nodded genially in the damp dusk as he pretended to stride with purpose past her, waited hidden in a recessed entryway to the next house up, then nimbly doubled back and caught the door just before it fully closed. He slipped a folded piece of paper into the bolt gap. Nobody had entered or left since.

  Pocketing the paper as he opened the door, he found himself in a dimly lit corridor with a marble floor and plaster walls painted a dark butterscotch. Quiet, affecting nonchalance though no one was there to appreciate his performance, he climbed the staircase to the right of the ground-floor apartment door. He moved expeditiously, knowing the chances were slim he would actually be able to gain entrance to Gerrit’s flat. If not, he hoped to depart Jánská without anybody’s knowing he had been there.

  When he reached the top landing, he saw there was no name beneath the bell by the door, so he rang. If Gerrit answered he could apologize for having disturbed him without an appointment, but say he happened to be in the neighborhood and wanted to add a few thoughts to his interview about postrevolution rediscovery of cultural materials, or some such malarkey. Thin excuse, he knew, but hardly thinner than Gerrit’s for meeting with him in the first place. Wittmann blamed himself there—a scholar’s fame tended to have a hasty half-life unless it was constantly tended to, and knowing that fame, like time or money, is power, he’d agreed to the extempore interview—but it gave him a convenient cover story now. Besides, he’d pulled off far more chancy situations with less. If worse came to worst and Gerrit was here, he might throw the journalist off balance by demanding, point-blank, why he’d come asking about puppet theater when what he really wanted to discuss was the sonata manuscript.

  No sound from within. He tried the knob. Locked. Lifting the doormat, he looked under it for a key. None was there. Slid his fingers across the top of the lintel but found nothing. At the end of the hallway a vase of tired flowers stood at the center of a small table. Beneath the vase he found what he was looking for. Strange how a stirring of excitement and worry wove through him. Any minor illegalities—he’d already theorized about his statement to the authorities—might be overlooked in light of the significance of the find. More important, he had not forgotten to bring Tomáš Lang’s copy with him to exchange for the original. Who could claim with any absolute assurance that old Lang hadn’t given the wrong copies to his benefactors? There was considerable latitude here for muddying any legal waters. He unlocked the door.

  Inside the room, a vague glow from the windows outlined the furniture. Some chairs, bookcases, a desk laden with what appeared to be careful stacks of books and papers. Being no burglar, Wittmann had neglected to bring a flashlight. He waited for his eyes to acclimate to the gloom, listening to himself breathe. A fluting wheeze, quick ins and outs, was what he heard, making him realize he was far more nervous than he had allowed himself to believe. After a minute, he decided there was no choice but to turn on one of Gerrit’s lights. A floor lamp stood farthest from the windows against the back wall of the room. He found its switch and suddenly the study burst into view.

  If the score was here, it could be in any number of hiding places. Rather than waste time pondering options, Wittmann started rifling through typescripts and notebooks on Gerrit’s worktable. Busy scrivener, he thought. Drafts upon drafts of articles and essays on European, and in particular Czech, politics and culture. In an earlier decade, Wittmann might have had him arrested on suspicion of espionage. Would that he still could. How he sometimes missed those days when he had more leverage, more shrouded clout.

  Feeling the pinch of time passing, he started looking behind volumes on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. As he pressed forward, he became less aware of the noise he was making. He dropped more than one stack of books on the floor, replacing some haphazardly before moving on to another row. He pulled up chair cushions and glanced beneath them, not seeing what he’d come for. He drew back the edges of the rugs, peering under them, stifling a sneeze. An antique secretary stood against the wall. Taking a penknife from the desk, he jimmied the lock until the lid fell open, revealing a leather brief and nondescript bric-a-brac. He rummaged through the brief, and, finding nothing, tossed it to the floor.

  The bedroom, he thought. People hide money under their mattresses, why not an eighteenth-century music manuscript? When he stepped through a tulip-arched alcove—the architectural addition of a nouveau-loving former occupant, no doubt—he thought he heard a door open. Not the door he’d used to enter the flat, but another, back near the kitchen. He froze, his breath caught in his throat.

  A little girl, her slender outline backlit by the overhead light she’d switched on in the kitchen. “Kdo jste?” she asked. Who are you?

  “A kdo jsi?” was all Wittmann could think to say, a weak response that carried weight only because of the gruff authority of his voice.

  “Bydlím tady,” Andrea responded, arms crossed. I live here.

  Wittmann frowned. Had he made a mistake? Was this the wrong apartment?

  Gerrit told me he lived here alone, he improvised, figuring that any fib he told her could later be denied.


  You know Gerrit?

  Of course. Why else would he have asked me to come here to get something for him.

  Get what? Andrea pressed, suspicious.

  Wittmann offered an ingratiating smile and spoke slowly, playing the patient adult to an irksome child, Now look. What did you say your name was?

  Andrea hesitated before saying, Petra.

  Yes, of course, Petra. Gerrit’s mentioned you on a number of occasions. He said I might run into you and that you could help me find some music he needs.

  A wave of fear burned through the girl. She had enough presence of mind not to let it show. She took a step back toward the downstairs door, asking, Where is Gerrit?

  He’s waiting for me with some others down on Karmelitská, he said, seeing her begin to retreat and standing his ground.

  Why didn’t he come here for it himself?

  You ask an awful lot of questions, don’t you? Instead of wasting his time and mine, why don’t you help me find it? Did he show you where he kept it?

  Before Wittmann had finished asking this third question, Petra had disappeared through the same door by which she’d entered. It wasn’t until he heard her throw the dead bolt and clomp quickly down the stairs that Wittmann knew he had to leave, and fast. Clutching Lang’s copy of the manuscript, he flew back out to Jánská. Hearing no one pursuing him, he walked, as swift as downhill water, over the echoing cobblestones. He had half a mind to double around to Šporkova and murder Tomáš Lang in his sleep, but he couldn’t prove himself an effective thief, never mind a killer. He walked across the Charles Bridge toward his apartment on Týnská, not far from Saint James Church, where the mummified and scrawny hand of a thief has hung for centuries near the entrance to the nave. Turning the collar of his greatcoat up against the buffeting, snappy breezes off the Vltava, he felt defeated but defiant. His acts, he reminded himself, had been for a worthy cause. He had done nothing wrong. If Petra described him to the authorities, and if by some improbable stretch they came questioning, and if by an even more far-fetched stretch of the imagination he stood accused of entering the American’s garret, nothing serious would come of it. He knew too many people and was, in turn, too well known for there to be consequences of any import. Times may have changed, he thought, but his influence had not.

  He could almost talk himself into believing this narrative line. Certainly, it was the way things should be seen, were the world clear-eyed and just.

  Not an hour after Wittmann had slipped away into the heavy Prague darkness, Meta and Gerrit stood before the same door at Jánská 12. A blue dismal fog had crept up from the river and lay in crevices and corners, chilling the air and blunting every stone that surrounded them. Mandelbaum’s suggestion, after they discovered the manuscript was missing and the Hodeks knew nothing, was to drop in on all his contacts unannounced.

  “Less time to concoct a story,” he reasoned, “so maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  They’d spent the rest of that day and the next not getting lucky. Together they traipsed from one address to another, looking for Wittmann, for Kohout, for Johana Langová, for Gretja Toplová, even for the curator at the Lobkowicz palace upriver, for anyone with whom Meta had discussed the sonata. Kohout claimed innocence of any such intrigue, and appeared genuinely rankled by the question. Who did they think they were, he groused, some sort of independent inquisition? None of the others they approached seemed suspect. They failed to locate Wittmann. He wasn’t at home, nor was he in his office at Charles University.

  Back in Mandelbaum’s hotel room after a second long, distressing day, their emotions veered from muffled despair to abject defeat.

  “Why don’t we go to the embassy? We have to do something, don’t we?”

  Paul realized he could no longer withhold Wittmann’s barely veiled admonitions. As Meta listened to his story, he saw a look on her face he had never seen before. Anger, worry, and contempt clouded her eyes.

  “All those years studying theory,” she said. “Heinrich Schenker. Meyer, Schoenberg, Lewin, Babbitt, all the rest of them. It was about music. Not criminal psychology. I know Wittmann’s behind this. It’s pure madness.”

  Mandelbaum shoved his hands into his pockets. “Madness?” he asked. “Gesualdo wrote some beautiful madrigals, but also murdered his wife. Donizetti was probably bipolar. Schumann, mad as a March hare. Even Bach spent a month in jail for breaking a contract with his Weimar patron. You can still see the lock from his cell in the Bach Museum in Eisenach. The list is long, Meta. Why should people who research their music and lives be any different?”

  “For a thousand reasons. They don’t work in the same boiling-hot cauldron, for one.”

  “Maybe. But they’re often no more balanced than those who did and do.”

  “I know,” she moaned, tucking her hair behind her ear, the old nervous tic, before covering her face with her hands. “It’s just, people showed such courage over the years to keep the manuscript from being stolen and I lost it in a matter of days. I’ve totally failed them.”

  “No, you haven’t,” said Gerrit. “I did.”

  “Nobody’s failed anybody except maybe me,” Mandelbaum contradicted them, “for having sent you to Petr Wittmann in the first place. And for agreeing to bring the middle movement from New York, where it was safe. But that’s all beside the point right now. We have to stay focused on finding it.”

  Having bade Mandelbaum good night, Gerrit and Meta took the metro back across the river to Malá Strana. Tired, depressed, distracted by the day, both looked forward to slipping into bed together and forgetting for a while the folly of not having deposited the score in a more secure place.

  Their spirits only sank further when they discovered that the apartment door was ajar, the key from beneath the vase still in the lock. Stepping into the front room, they were sickened by the ransacking. Books splayed on the floor, reams of paper splashed onto the carpet. Why break in a second time if the single object of value here had already been taken? And why be tidy the first time only to wreak such havoc on a second foray?

  “No matter what either of you say, this is all my doing,” Meta apologized, no longer able to hold back tears. Stepping over to the window, she stared out at Petřín Hill, a great murky hunchback huddled under tiny stars. “You had a nice quiet life before I came crashing in, asking crazy questions, turning things upside down.”

  “That’s not true,” Gerrit countered, standing with a clutch of notebooks in his hands.

  “I’m no better than my father, thinking only of myself and wrecking everything around me. Honestly, I should take a hint and get out of Prague before anything worse happens.”

  “No,” he said, slapping the notebooks down on the table. He walked over and turned her to face him. The gloom in his eyes quickened into a hard resolve. “What you should do is help me straighten up. In the morning, I’ll get a better lock and stop leaving the key on the hall table where any idiot can find it. Please,” putting his arms around her, “stop now.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just at an end here. Not with you,” she was quick to add. “With myself more like.”

  “That’ll change.”

  They set about replacing volumes on shelves and typescripts in stacks on the worktable. Why was it, Meta wondered, gathering up an armful of scattered books, that burglars, would-be or not, couldn’t resist vandalizing victims’ homes? Was it written down in some manual of evil deeds?

  Not wanting her to see the forlorn briefcase lying on the floor, Gerrit set it back inside the secretary and closed the lid. When they finally went to bed, agreeing they’d finish cleaning up the rest of the mess tomorrow, Meta, despite her fatigue, whispered to Gerrit that she had another idea about how to track down Wittmann. Whether he was willfully evading them when they’d gone to his flat on Týnská and his office at Charles University was anyone’s guess. But, either way, she had noticed the professor’s course list, with classroom hours and locations, posted beside his door. A clas
s was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. She would run him to ground in his academic lair.

  Under a cobalt sky, a bite of autumn in the air, Gerrit accompanied Meta to the university the next day, where she asked him to wait outside. “Nothing may come of this, but it’s my responsibility to confront him on my own,” she told him, resolute.

  From the notes on the chalkboard, Wittmann’s lecture appeared to be about Arnold Dolmetsch’s work on seventeeth- and eighteenth-century musical ornamention. Meta stood at the back of the hall, as yet unnoticed, half-wishing she could understand the professor’s Czech. She was struck by how formal his delivery was, how precise and authoritative. Quietly, diligently taking notes, his students were attentive to every word he said.

  When Wittmann glanced up from his lectern to see the American staring at him from some distance, he continued, seemingly unperturbed, to finish the point he was making and then dismissed the class for a break. Students pushed past her, opening packs of cigarettes and looking at mobile phones as they emptied the room. Meta took this as a sign to approach.

  “What brings you here, Miss Tavener?” Wittmann asked when she reached the front of the lecture hall. “I would have thought you already knew Dolmetsch’s work backward and forward.”

  “We tried calling you,” she said, ignoring his remark, as well as his insistent mispronunciation of her name. “We even went to your flat.”