City of Lost Dreams

THREE

Nicolas Pertusato was not in the best of spirits. This was annoying, since he had been imbibing the best of spirits for a long time now and should have been feeling more cheerful. Of course, plane travel was no more a comfortable experience for him than it was for people with less abbreviated statures. On the one hand, he had more leg room than most adults. On the other hand, he could not make use of the overhead bins without engaging a flight attendant, and there were no attractive ones on this particular flight to London. You had to fly to Dubai to get a shapely stewardess these days. Although the ones on Japan Air were still fairly delectable.

Nico watched the giantess in the window seat next to him attempt to eat her dinner. Like the other behemoths on the aircraft, her arms were wedged so tightly in the seat she could use only wrist movements and a kind of lizardlike head bobbing to forage. That was diverting.

Well, and the appearance of Saint John of Nepomuk in Prague had been intriguing. The whole episode did have the ring of the kinds of practical jokes Nico and his friends used to play in the past. Except someone had shot at Sarah. That was simply not cricket.

“I only sell you one bottle and yet you have three empties.” The depressingly mannish Czech airline . . . person . . . pointed to the row of vodka bottles on his seat tray. Nico sighed. Why would you not take something that rolled past you at hand height?

He was drinking a bit much these days, and he had seen Sarah notice it, but he had a lot on his mind. He really did want to find the ingredients for Philippine Welser’s medicine. It would be nice to do something for Pollina. Sarah was skeptical about the old herbal remedies, but Nico had seen the miracles those healing women had worked. Certainly antibiotics and anesthesia were major improvements over biting a strap while someone sawed your leg off, but modern medicine had its blind spots.

What would modern medicine have to say about himself, for instance? Nico knew that somewhere the cure for his condition must exist. Tycho Brahe had made him immortal from a formula he had stolen from one of Emperor Rudolf’s books. The book of the Golden Fleece. Sarah had seen the book—under the influence of Westonia—but then had lost the trail. Nico and Max had spent the better part of the past two years trying to pick up the trail on their own, with no luck. Sarah had reported seeing Tycho Brahe discussing the Fleece with the old mathematician and alchemist Dr. John Dee, and Nico had been all over Europe hunting through Dee’s old diaries and artifacts. There was plenty to be found—the Bodleian Library at Oxford had a trove of Dee’s diaries, but nothing even remotely Fleece-y.

The thought of blowing the one solid chance he had at shucking off the old immortal coil had thoroughly depressed him. Carpe diem was fun only as long as you had a diem to carpe. Carpe eternum was a drag. If he was hitting the bottle a little harder lately, who could blame him?

Nico took a train from Heathrow to Paddington, deciding to detour for a pint at a favorite haunt from the old days. It might cheer him up a little.

The Windsor Castle pub in Kensington loomed up before him. Oh, the divertissements he’d enjoyed with his friends here! Like the time he had dispatched town criers to stand under the Duchess of Kent’s window and announce her beheading. Nobody knew how to punk properly anymore. Or spy! Computer hacking had brought all kinds of boring people into the trade, and the market was flooded, which drove down prices. Barely enough to keep a man out of the circus. Not that he had to worry so much about money anymore. Nico ordered a tankard of pear cider and considered the Barbour-clad Sloane Rangers on their cell phones around him. These days he only picked pockets if he was in a good mood. He watched a couple of lawyers in Zegna suits bend themselves in half to try to squeeze through the door to the back room, which was only four feet, six inches high, then strode through himself, head held high.

“Looks like it was made for you, mate,” remarked the ironically muttonchopped barkeep.

“It was,” said Nico and headed for the loo, recalling—just in time—that it was no longer acceptable to urinate out the front window onto the street. Sometimes when he got drinking, his chronology became a trifle confused.

Several pints of cider and a shot of Irish whiskey sloshed gently in his stomach as he walked down Piccadilly, ignoring the curious—then deliberately uncurious—reactions of passersby to his unusual person. Only very small children were honest about staring, the little cretins. Gods, London had really lost its stink and become incredibly clean. So depressing.

The British Museum was famously enormous, a receptacle for all the loot the Brits had managed to impolitely carry off while visiting any number of foreign countries (and sneering down their noses at the locals). What a mania for collection they had! The Elgin Marbles, endless amounts of statuary, pottery, jewelry, and other artifacts—all had been “rescued” from savage territories in order to be displayed here for all future generations of snotty British schoolchildren. At least the Rosetta Stone was now under glass—until just a few years ago, anyone could rub their filthy jam-stained hands over it. And why not? Full of foreign scratchings, it was.

How I long to be done with you all, he thought, making his way through the lofty hallways, squeezing through hordes of blank-eyed tourists wearing headsets.

He did look forward to seeing the galleon again. According to official records, the ship—which was also a clock and an ingenious automaton—was made by Hans Schlottheim, and it was believed to have once been in the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II. Nico happened to know that Philippine Welser was the one who had given it to Rudolf. It would not be an easy thing to steal, but that only made it more of a challenge. He would . . .

Nico stared at the empty glass display case. Inside where the automaton should have been, where it had been since 1866 when his old friend Octavius Morgan had donated it to the museum, there was instead a small white index card that read simply Removed for curatorial purposes.

This was not amusing. Whenever Nico needed to “borrow” something from a museum, he replaced it with one of his own Removed for curatorial purposes cards. He had them in the paper stock and fonts of about fifty different museums. It was extremely efficient, because it meant days or even months would pass before some nosy curator actually checked with the other curators and realized none of them had the object. He had “borrowed” this galleon himself, the last time he was in London.

What to do now? Nico looked around the museum. All these horrible children running around in perfect health, and Pollina . . .

No. There were other places he could find useful items for Philippine’s recipe. Nico stopped at another pub to mull and had a couple pints of a really lovely amber ale and another whiskey to wash them down, which took the edge off his headache.

It was important that he not get too attached to the idea of saving Pollina. You know what happens when you get attached.

Nico’s next stop was the British Library. It had the only copy outside Austria of Philippine Welser’s Book of Useful Medicines, with marginalia by John Dee and his partner, Edward Kelley. This might be useful, though Nico had gotten very irritated with old John Dee. It was hard to know what the man had truly believed. And by the end, Edward Kelley had filled Dee’s head with so much nonsense that the old necromancer didn’t know his ass from his pointy beard. Poor Dee. And when you knew the details, poor Mrs. Dee.

Nico submitted his request at the library’s desk and waited an unconscionably long time—with a few trips to the loo to fortify himself from his pocket flask—before the Jamaican librarian returned.

“I’m very sorry. The materials you requested are not here.”

“Not here?” Nico pulled himself up to his full height. “And where might they be, then?”

“They have been removed,” said the librarian with maddening indifference. “That’s all the note says. Removed.”

An hour later, and four more members of the staff interrogated, and Nico left the library still no further on his quest. No one seemed to know where Philippine’s book had ended up, and even the records that should have informed them who had last looked at the materials had gone missing.

This required a bit more whiskey. But he wasn’t done yet.

Nico arrived at the Science Museum an hour before closing and made his way to the fifth floor. He skirted a group of foul-mouthed schoolboys and made a brief inspection of camera locations and other security devices. Nothing a few magnets, a mirror, and a little patience couldn’t get past. He made his way to the Giustiniani medicine chest. A nice little example of sixteenth-century pharmacopoeia. One hundred twenty-six bottles and pots within the case still contained their original elements. He only needed two of them for Philippine’s recipe. Theriac and eagle bezoar.

No.

The medicine chest was gone. Not only gone, but in its place stood a small figurine of Khnumhotep, manager of ka-priests in ancient Egypt. Khnumhotep had no business being in this particular case of Renaissance medicine. His presence was an outrage, a deliberate insult.

Khnumhotep was a dwarf.

Nicolas Pertusato had an opponent. Game on.

Three hours later he was, Nico realized, not quite able to follow the lines of cobbles in the sidewalk. It might actually be that he was truly drunk now. He could not perfectly recall, for instance, what year it was.

Or what century.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He had been here often enough. Oh, yes. He was right near Soane’s house. Soane! Soane was excellent company. Soane would be helpful.

Nico made his way to number 13 and rang the bell.

“Soane!” he yelled up at the windows. “Soane! Open up! I want to raid your medicine chest.”

“It’s closed,” said someone behind him, striding past. Some uncouth ruffian without a hat. Where was his own hat? He seemed to be filthy. Luckily, Soane would let you in if your feet were clean.

Nico tried the door again to no avail. Soane must be upstairs, having a wee nip himself. Since his wife had died, he’d hardly gone out at all, and Nico knew he’d be grateful for a visit. Soane wasn’t comfortable at social gatherings, though his perceived deficiency wasn’t height, but class. The son of a bricklayer, he had worked his way up to being a prominent architect for all the toffiest toffs in London’s West End, but his real passion was teaching, and he had opened up his fascinating little house to visitors just a few years earlier, welcoming anyone with an interest in classical architecture and antiquities and offering them guided tours and cups of tea. Soane’s Museum and Academy of Architecture, he called it, which Nico found rather pretentious. Soane’s Future Jumble Sale, more like.

Fortunately, among his collectibles was a certain desk with a certain drawer (number 13) that contained a nice sampling of alchemical ingredients.

Nico made his way around back, where he knew a way up the drainpipe and into the second-floor window. It was on a rainy night like this that Nico had helped Soane build a funerary monument to Fanny, Soane’s wife’s dog. They had gone out in the middle of the night and found an unmarked headstone in the churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, brought it home, then Nico had inscribed it. Alas, poor Fanny! it had read.

Soane knew how to laugh.

The window was stickier than he remembered, but Nico eventually jimmied it open and made his way through the darkened house, keeping quiet so as not to wake the dogs. Soane could be a bit squiffy about lending things. He would get what he needed first, and then go wake up his friend. Nico tiptoed down the stairs to the basement, feeling his way in the dark, which wasn’t easy since Soane was perhaps the biggest of all British pack rats. He never saw a Greek or Roman cornice or chunk of masonry he didn’t want to bring home.

There it was. The desk. And there was the drawer and now . . .

No.

Removed for curatorial purposes. But this was Soane’s home. The only curator here was Soane. This was beyond a joke. Furious, Nico charged toward the staircase, tripped, and fell face-first into something very hard.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. He had fallen into Soane’s marble sarcophagus. Soane had bought it from an Egyptian dealer and it was reputed to be more valuable than anything like it in the British Museum. To celebrate its arrival Soane had thrown a party for three hundred people and made them come in and view it in shifts, with the house all lit by candles.

Nico banged his head against the side of the sarcophagus in frustration. It would do him no good. He could bash his head for hours and there would be intense pain, blood, and probably a twenty-year headache, but he wouldn’t die. And Oksana would give him hell about the bruises.

The alcohol was already wearing off. Of course Soane wasn’t here. This really was a museum now. Soane had died in 1837. Nico had attended the funeral.

So many funerals. He would stand at the graves of them all, every last one of them.