City of Lost Dreams

THIRTEEN

“How you find her missing computer?” asked Alessandro. “You are not a detective. Let the polizia find it. She is pazza.”

It had crossed Sarah’s mind that Bettina was possibly a little pazza, or at least in the throes of some kind of paranoid nervous breakdown. Since she was feeling not quite ten pins up herself, she had confided in Alessandro, but only to the extent of saying that she had gotten a text from the doctor, and that Bettina had asked her to find her stolen laptop.

Alessandro announced he was making a risotto con funghi porcini, opened a bottle of Brunello, and ordered her to begin chopping onions and parsley. “I am doubling the recipe. You need your strength,” he said. “My mamma was from Milan and she make me risotto before every one of my exams. My father was pure Napolitano, so he make pizza. I was a very fat bambino.”

Sarah sipped her Brunello and weighed her options. She felt trapped. It sounded as if Oksana and the team of doctors in Prague had basically thrown up their hands. Whether Bettina Müller was crazy or not, Sarah couldn’t just walk away. Not yet.

Together she and Alessandro decided that Nina Fischer, Bettina’s grad student, should be her first stop. She might seek out Marie-Franz, too, while Sarah was at the university. The professor had been there a long time. At the very least, she could fill her in on what Bettina’s colleagues thought of her.

Why would someone steal a laptop? When Sarah’s last machine had died, it had been annoying, but not devastating. Everything was backed up, so she guessed Bettina’s concern wasn’t so much about what she was missing, it was more about who had her stuff and was looking at it. Not surprising, since in addition to her research, Bettina was trafficking in stolen art and possibly in illegal hallucinogens. Sarah could be walking headfirst into several different kinds of criminal intrigue. She poured herself another glass of wine and, just for good measure, added another scoop of risotto to her plate.

She awakened from a tumultuous sleep on Alessandro’s pullout sofa at eight, regretting both the extra helping and the final grappa he’d insisted on as a “digestivo.” She had dreamed that she was in a round white room, surrounded by doors. She was holding Pollina in her arms. There was something she had to do to save Pols, something urgent, behind one of those doors, but if she picked the wrong one . . . There had been a woman there, too, dressed in clothes constructed from strange discs of gold. Sarah had felt the weight of the garments as if she were wearing them herself.

“I cannot die,” said the woman.

Time was running out. Sarah began to open a door, and as the certainty washed over her that she had made the wrong—terribly, terribly wrong—decision, she woke up shouting, “No!”

Alessandro took her to historic Café Landtmann for breakfast on their way to the university. Waiters with white jackets and black bow ties executed a complicated ballet around the restaurant, ducking in between tables, swooping and gliding between the chairs. The café sat next to the Burgtheater, another titanic white building, one of the biggest theaters in Europe, built to satisfy the desire of Empress Maria Theresia, who wished to have a playhouse near her palace. In 1943 “Die Burg” had hosted a notoriously anti-Semitic production of Merchant of Venice. At the time, almost all the Jews of Vienna had already either fled or been sent to camps, but perhaps the gods of Tragedy and Comedy that sat atop the building, at least, had been offended by the production. The building had been almost totally destroyed in World War II. And then restored, as Vienna had been restored. Up from the ashes.

At a nearby table an Englishman ranted about the poor curation of the Freud Museum, while his wife did a crossword and complained of “Platz fatigue.”

“This café was the favorite place of Dr. Freud,” Alessandro said to Sarah.

“How do you think Freud would have interpreted a dream of a round white room?”

“You want a penis,” guessed Alessandro, a little too loudly. The couple sitting near them looked over, and the man laughed a little.

“I thought you were a neuroscientist.” Sarah took a sip of her mélange. “What about short-term memory consolidating events into a hierarchy according to emotions and a lot of random synapses firing during the process?”

“Sì,” said Alessandro. “And then there is my nonna’s idea that the dreams are the reality, not this. I like best Freud’s idea that it is always about sex.” He licked his spoon lasciviously.

Sex, but also violence, Sarah thought, were the undercurrents of Viennese history carefully papered over with postcards of Sissi and dancing white horses. A hundred and forty years had passed since Johann Strauss wrote his waltz “Vienna Blood,” and there had been quite a lot of real blood spilled in the city since then. The final decimation of the Hapsburg Empire, two world wars, the attempt to wipe out an entire race. And yet, the famous cafés of Vienna with the famous waiters still served the famous coffee and cakes. No wonder the city had been the cradle of psychoanalysis.

Sarah went to the bathroom, leaving Alessandro perusing one of the many newspapers hung on wooden poles for the customers’ use. As she passed the glass case of sweets, she heard a gruff “Grüss Gott,” and turned to see the bearded horse rider she’d met at the ball entering from the street and saluting the maître d’. She remembered he smelled good but had been exceptionally rude, so she pretended not to see him and kept going, but when she emerged from the ladies’ room he was waiting for her.

“Frau Doktor Weston? I am Gottfried von Hohenlohe. We met at the ball.”

“Yes, I remember. Are you coming from another one?” Sarah indicated the loden cape he wore over a three-piece suit.

“No.” He looked down at his cape, puzzled. “It is cold today. This is Austrian.”

Sarah smiled, trying to imagine an America where it was considered natural to tog out like Betsy Ross.

“Ah, you tease,” he said with a smile. “Because I was so rude at the ball. You must forgive me. I am ill at ease around beautiful women.”

“I doubt that. I’m glad you are able to understand my German today.”

“You are picking up the accent, I notice.”

He touched her arm and Sarah felt all her senses kick into gear. Rude or not, Gottfried definitely had a certain magnetism.

“Gottfried,” called a voice from a near table. Sarah saw it was the schlumpy older guy from the ball who’d made such an incongruous pair with Nina. He was carrying a leather briefcase and wearing what she guessed was an expensive raincoat, but somehow on him it looked messy and rumpled. Nina had definitely picked the wrong von Hohenlohe.

“You remember my brother, Heinrich,” said Gottfried. “Are you in Vienna long?”

“A few days.” Sarah nodded. “I should get back to my friend,” she said. “Nice to see you again.”

“Perhaps you will allow me to give you a tour of the Spanish Riding School some day after morning exercise.” Gottfried handed her his card, which had nothing but his name in raised letters. He took a gold fountain pen out from under his cape and wrote his number underneath. “The stallions are quite remarkable up close.”

I bet they are, she thought with a sigh. She pocketed the card, thanked him, and rejoined Alessandro.

“Not interested?” he asked, since of course he had been observing the whole thing. “I thought you and Max were over.”

“Maybe interested, but I’ve got other things to do here,” said Sarah. She didn’t want to talk about Max with Alessandro—or anyone, for that matter. The feelings for him that had resurfaced when she was in Prague were confusing, and there was enough confusion without going into all that. So she switched the conversation over to Nina as they left the café.

“How well do you know her?”

“We only sleep together once,” he said, making Sarah laugh. Of course he had. “I know when she was sixteen she ran away from little village outside of Salzburg. I remember this because Salzburg is town of strange movie The Sound of Music which you force me to see.”

Sarah had taken him to an outdoor showing on the Boston Common, where people had dressed up and sung along, which the Italian had found alarming, though not alarming enough to prevent him slipping off with a girl dressed as a warm woolen mitten.

“Is she really dating that older guy?” Sarah asked. “Heinrich? Seems like an odd match.”

“She is odd girl.” Alessandro shrugged. “This thing with the raccoon eyes and the hair and the tattoos, the Italian girls they do not do that. They like to be beautiful, as beautiful as possible. I know Nina only start working for Bettina this past semester, helping in the lab. What else can I tell you? Ah. Her labia, she is pierced.”

“Not helpful,” said Sarah. “But thanks.”

“Who doesn’t have a grudge against Bettina?” said Nina, whom Alessandro and Sarah had arranged to meet on one of the benches outside the immunology building. It was cold, and Nina had suggested they move up to the lab, where she needed to check in on the rats. Alessandro had gone to work, which Sarah was glad about. She didn’t want him distracting Nina.

“She dismisses all of her grad students at the end of every semester,” the girl was saying now. “And yet she’s so brilliant that we all line up again, like lambs to the slaughter.”

Nina threw a white lab coat over her ripped plaid jeans, Doc Martens, and Debbie Harry T-shirt safety-pinned together, and started making notes on the rats. She said that Bettina had sent her a message to keep things running, but hadn’t left any more instructions than that. They moved back and forth between German and English, which Nina spoke very idiomatically, though with a thick accent.

“She basically told me she was hiring me because I grew up taking care of goats,” said Nina, surveying her rodent charges in their cages. “I guess I should thank my asshole father who made me work on the farm since I was three years old, since because of him I have no problem with blood and shit. I clean up after the rats. And then I cut them open.”

“So you have talked to her since the break-in?”

“She sent me a couple texts, but she’s being really cagey about where she is. Not that I blame her. Weirdos send her hate mail all the time. Religious zealots or just regular people who hear about what she’s doing and think she’s going too far. But that’s what gets me off about nanobiology. It’s a crazy inventive branch of science, like mad scientists, you know, and Bettina is one of the maddest scientists in the field.”

That Sarah didn’t doubt.

“People just don’t get it, but then, most people are idiots. Yeah, and a lot of sick people write to her, too, begging her to help. So she has to deal with that. Oh”—Nina blushed—“sorry. I forgot about your friend.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah said. “But can you tell me anything about the work? I know that at least part of it is on cytokines, and I know people think cytokines are now believed to be the ‘software’ of the immune system.”

Nina seemed relieved Sarah wasn’t offended. Despite the punk exterior, she was as friendly as a puppy, and hugely enthusiastic about her work. It wasn’t difficult to picture the country girl who had run away from goats and ended up with rats.

“Cytokines are hot right now,” Nina explained. “We know they send messages, but not why they sometimes screw up and send bad ones. Where the bad input is coming from. It might be in the DNA itself. Maybe from what we call the noncoding part.”

“Bad messages.” Sarah nodded. “So you need to tell the DNA to send a different message.”

“Exactly. That’s what Bettina has figured out, how to do it. But I can’t tell you much more than that. I don’t even know myself. I do the grunt work. Not that I’m complaining. It’s totally a privilege.”

“How do you send a message to DNA? I mean, how does a drug do it? And is it a pill or a . . . a mist?” Sarah wondered if the drug in the galleon was part of Bettina’s experiments. It had certainly had an effect on the immune system. But Nina showed no glimmer of recognition.

“A mist? That is funny. Okay, first you take carbon, right, like just plain old ashes from the fireplace?”

Ashes to ashes, thought Sarah. How appropriate.

“You give the carbon atoms an electric charge so they form into a lattice on their own, like nano-size chicken wire. Then you roll that into a tube, and that’s the vehicle for whatever you need to attach to it and send into the cell.”

“And because it’s made of carbon just like everything else, the body doesn’t recognize it as an enemy substance and doesn’t fight it off?”

“You got it. It can zoom right into the nucleus of the cell and even attach to the DNA itself.”

“That’s really . . . nano-Frankenstein.”

“It’s fucking rad. And guess what the best molecule for attaching to the nanotube is? Gold. Molecules of gold.”

“Gold? So basically, the most cutting edge of science involves ashes and gold?”

“Fucking poetic, right?” Nina nodded. “But it works. In theory. Uh-oh.” She stared into a cage where a rat was curled up in his nest. “Number 47 has gone kaput.” She snapped on a glove and pulled out the dead rat.

“Did he . . .” Sarah thought this would be a good time to ask just how far Bettina’s research had been tested. If rats were still dying from it, then she would call off the search right now.

“No, this guy is part of the control group.” Nina laughed. “He just died like we all die if nobody fixes our shit. I should probably get going on him.” She laid the rat on the table and unwrapped a bag of medical instruments.

“Oh, of course.” Sarah watched her pull out a scalpel. “Thanks for talking with me.”

“Sorry I can’t help you more. You should talk to Bettina. She’s really okay. She’s kind of looked out for me, in a funny way. I seem to attract protectors.” She laughed again.

“I saw Heinrich von Hohenlohe at Café Landtmann.” Sarah smiled. “He’s your . . . boyfriend?”

“Oh, he’s just useful.” Nina shrugged. “We met at a club and he bought me and my friends all drinks one night. He’s okay. He says he’ll get me a job at the pharmaceutical company where he works when I graduate. You need connections in Vienna.”

Pharmaceutical company? thought Sarah. Maybe Heinrich’s interest in Nina wasn’t purely sexual after all. A pharmaceutical company would be very interested in what Bettina was up to. Nina was clearly whip smart, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still a naive goat girl when it came to the ways of men.

“Has Heinrich ever visited you at the lab?”

“God, no. I’m supposed to work alone here. So many rules. If she knew I was even talking to you she’d be paranoid. Everything with Bettina is eine sehr grosse Sache.”

Maybe even a bigger deal than you know, thought Sarah.