City of Lost Dreams

THIRTY-THREE

“Sarah?” Gottfried. It was Gottfried walking down the hallway. Present-day Gottfried. The Gottfried who had stolen Bettina’s laptop. The Gottfried who . . .

Sarah shoved the vial deep into her pocket. She needed to think about why Philippine had given this to her, instead of something that would help Pols, but right now she needed to get out of being in a secluded sixteenth-century castle with a potentially homicidal maniac. Where was her purse? Not that a Swiss Army knife would be much help if Gottfried was intent on killing her. She looked out the window, and judged the distance to the ground.

“I’m so sorry I was delayed,” said Gottfried. “And I have bad news for you, I’m afraid. I was finally able to find the key to the library, but when I went in to get the book from its case, I found this.” He showed her a card.

Removed for curatorial purposes.

“Heinrich must have lent it to some museum,” he said. “I am surprised. Usually we let nothing out of our sight. Ah, well, but we will have a nice dinner anyway.”

“Thank you for looking.” Sarah’s mind was racing. “I really do appreciate it. But while you were gone, I had a phone call. A work crisis. I need to get back to . . . to Boston. As soon as possible. I’m afraid I can’t stay the night.”

“Very well.” Gottfried took her arm. “I will drive you to the airport and you can explain to me what a crisis in musicology consists of.” He reached into his pocket.

A harsh blast of hot, white light hit Sarah’s face like a bomb going off. It strobed as she closed her eyes and threw her arm across her face. She heard a thud, and a grunt, and then she was grabbed around the neck and forced into something—onto it—and she was shouting but she was blind, and someone was binding her, gripping her, and she could hear more grunting and thrashing and her wrists were locked into place and she felt metal across her waist and legs. She was manacled to a chair.

She could see spots. She could see black spots, and then colored whorls, and then she could dimly make out Gottfried on the ground in front of her. He was having a seizure, shuddering and convulsing. And standing over him was another man.

Heinrich.

She was strapped to a chair. Bound. She tried to kick her legs as hard as she could, but the straps held. Straps that fitted into metal locks.

“It’s very effective, isn’t it?” said Heinrich. “Ferdinand’s little party game. He would make his guests sit in it, then lock them down and not let them loose until they had answered a riddle.”

“What the fuck?” Sarah said. “Look at your brother! Help him!”

“I am well aware that my brother is having an epileptic fit. There are many causes of epilepsy, but they say in his case it is a defect on chromosome 20. The telomeres bind to themselves and form a ring. So his number 20 is an O, not an I. An old Hapsburg gene that has resurfaced. The price of all that inbreeding to keep the family close.”

“Fascinating,” snapped Sarah. “To repeat my earlier question: what the fuck?”

“Oh.” Heinrich pursed his lips as Gottfried’s convulsions ceased and he lay still, apparently unconscious. “I am afraid that you know too much for me to let you go. But thank you for the rat.”

Thank God, Sarah thought. Thank God we switched the rats. “Bettina Müller is working on a cure for defects in chromosome 20,” Sarah said. “Is that why you want the rat, to cure your brother? Because maybe I can help.”

Heinrich laughed a small, tight laugh. “My brother’s epilepsy has been useful. I see no need to cure it, especially since only an hour ago he threatened me. Told me to leave you alone. Gottfried’s seizures are very easy to trigger these days, you know. All it takes is a burst of light. Sets off an electrical storm in the brain. Isn’t it interesting, how it really does all come down to energy imbalances? Soon all scientists will sound like New Age hippies.”

Sarah began carefully testing the strength of the metal and wood that held her fast. It was five hundred years old, this chair—it must have a weak point.

“He does not remember what happens during the attacks. So I have to tell him. Sadly, he is often violent. He will awaken to discover that he has hurt you, I’m afraid.”

Heinrich slipped a noose over Sarah’s head. A noose made of piano wire.

“Like the cat?” she asked quickly. “Did you make him think that he had shot the cat with the crossbow?”

Heinrich paused, staring at her, frowning. “How do you know that?” he asked. “Gottfried would not have told you.”

“I know you killed Herr Dorfmeister, too,” said Sarah, trying to twist around. She had to keep him talking until she found a weakness in the chair. “How did you pull that one off?”

“Gottfried went to see if he had missed anything in the apartment. He had a seizure. The old man called me. Gottfried wears a bracelet with my number on it. I took care of Herr Dorfmeister. But don’t worry. For him, a nice old Austrian gentleman, I used a drug that causes a painless death. But I’m afraid you have no one but yourself to blame for Nina.”

Sarah froze. “You killed Nina? And Gerhard Schmitt?”

“How pleasant it is to speak of such things openly. I could not share this even with my brother, you see, because he thinks I am weak, and it is better that way. It was only supposed to be her. I saw you together, going into the lab. I followed her, only to ask what you had talked about. She grew suspicious of my questions, began to accuse me of things, and that was when that blond fop showed up.”

“Gerhard?”

“The little witch would sleep with him, but not with me? They accused me of spying, threatened to go to the police. I had no choice, you see.”

It was no use. The chair was solid.

“My brother suspected, I think,” Heinrich continued. “That’s why he warned me to stay away from you. He is loyal, but I fear that eventually he would have cracked. His strange ideas about honor have become inconvenient. Perhaps it was fate that saved you both in the stables. If you had died then, I would never have gotten the rat.”

“You set the fire in the stable,” said Sarah. “You tried to kill us both.”

Heinrich shrugged. “Among other things, I hate horses.”

He began to tighten the garrote, then leaned over and whispered, “The tourists come to Vienna, and they enjoy the opera, and the Sacher torte, and they buy a souvenir hat and they think what a lovely civilized place Austria is. A little fussy, perhaps, but safe as houses. They forget the past. They forget what is in our stars.” Sarah could feel the wire cutting into her throat. The room began to go black. The wire was cutting off the flow of blood to her brain.

“I will kill him, too. I will be the heir. My sons will be the sons to inherit. Gottfried cannot be trusted. If he told some American bitch he barely knows about Herr Dorfmeister . . .”

“No. I saw,” Sarah whispered. “You won the chess game. In the garden. You beat Gottfried. It was the shower of gold. It was your move.”

Heinrich stopped tightening the noose. “How did you know that?” The garrote loosened slightly.

“I saw you.”

“That is a lie.”

She had seen them. She had seen. The garden. The game. The chair. She had seen the chair she was sitting in before. In the garden. Philippine. Ferdinand. A riddle. What can’t the blind man do? The blind man can’t see.

You have to break the glass, Philippine said. But the glass is inside the locks. What can the blind man not do?

“You must be a witch,” said Heinrich, tightening the noose again. “We burn witches here at the Schloss. You wouldn’t be the first.”

The blind man can’t see. C. A note. A musical note.

As Heinrich’s noose started to cut off her air again, Sarah began to scream. She wasn’t normally the screaming type. But this was a very particular scream.

A scream in C. Every piece of glass has a natural resonance. Every material on earth has it. A frequency. Match the pitch and the molecules will vibrate. Do it loud enough . . . Sarah did not attempt a high C, but her pitch was perfect, and she could sing very loud.

As she did, she felt something vibrate and then shatter inside the metal locks as they released. Sarah’s now free hands shot up and she lurched forward, grabbing Heinrich’s throat and kneeing him in the balls as hard as she could.

Heinrich’s scream came pretty close to a high C. Sarah shoved him roughly and he stumbled backward into a glass case, which shattered. A solid alabaster skull with ruby eyes rolled off one of the shelves and hit Heinrich on the head. He fell to the floor.

Sarah removed the piano wire from her throat, choking still. She could feel blood, but the cut wasn’t deep enough, thank God.

Thank the past.

Gottfried was coming to. She sank to the floor next to him.

“Gottfried,” she croaked through the burning in her throat.

“Heinrich,” he whispered. “Heinrich, what have I done now?”

“Gottfried, it’s not you. It’s your brother. It’s Heinrich who does these terrible things. It’s not you. Heinrich is the murderer.”