City of Lost Dreams

SIX

Alessandro directed the cab to leave them at Borschkegasse, and he pointed out the building where Bettina Müller’s lab was located, a newer, modern edifice tucked behind yet another row of Vienna’s white Neo-Baroque giants. Alessandro wanted to come with her, but the doctor had specifically stated that Sarah should come alone, so he loitered near a fountain on the campus Platz, nervously smoking a cigarette. By the time she returned, Sarah figured, he would probably have picked up a sophomore. Or three.

There were still a couple of lights on in the laboratory building. Someone had put a piece of tape over the lock on the front door and left a card directing a pizza delivery to the third floor. Dry-erase boards and posters lined the walls of the entranceway, bearing testimony to the work being done in the building: schedules, reminders about safety precautions, a challenge from the Molecular Medicine team for a night of disco bowling.

Bettina’s lab was on the second floor, at the end of a long hallway. Sarah had to use the flashlight app on her phone to navigate, as the overhead fluorescents were off. This made her a little uneasy. The previous night was bullets in a river, and Nico had said she should remain en garde. Difficult to do when dressed like a naughty beermaid. Sarah reached into her purse. Her choice of weapons was either a pen or the plastic sword from Nico’s Barbatini, which had somehow ended up in her evening bag. She wondered what he had taken in exchange.

The door to Bettina’s lab was standing open, but the lights were off.

“Hallo?” she called. “Frau Dr. Müller? Es ist Sarah Weston.”

No answer. Sarah felt for the light switch inside the door and clicked it, but nothing happened. She shone her phone around the room, getting partial glimpses of long tables, stools, cabinets, sinks, lab equipment. The room smelled powerfully of bleach.

She jumped at the sound of scratching and a mechanical clink. She directed her light toward the noise and discovered a row of numbered cages. Sarah had seen plenty of white lab rats, but these were all gray, some drinking water, some sleeping, one little guy starting to exercise vigorously (or neurotically) on a wheel. Sarah stepped backward, slipping on a laminated poster depicting two soapy hands and the injunction Waschen Sie Ihre Hände! that had fallen to the floor. She heard a distinct tearing sound.

Then she heard the elevator door opening and the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the hall, several voices speaking at once.

“Hallo? Hallo?” Sarah stepped outside the lab and was momentarily blinded by the beam of a powerful flashlight hitting her directly in the face. For the second time in as many days, she heard the click of a gun being cocked.

At least, Sarah thought, she wasn’t the only one at the police station in a dirndl, though hers was the only one with a side seam busted open. She counted a half dozen people in ball costumes, two of them in handcuffs, singing a spirited version of “Das Schönste auf der Welt” at the tops of their lungs. The officer who was transcribing Sarah’s statement looked up at the serenaders, frowned, then informed Sarah that the song was a fine one if sung properly, in tune.

Well, she had definitely arrived in Vienna.

There had been quite a scene with the police. After Sarah had explained to the officers what she was doing in the lab and they had holstered their guns, one officer had been dispatched to collect Alessandro from the Platz. By then, Nina Fischer had arrived.

It was Nina who had sent the police to the lab. Bettina Müller, it seemed, had phoned Nina in a panic, saying she had gotten a text from a blocked number telling her that her laboratory had been broken into.

“But she couldn’t come herself,” Nina explained. “Because she was already on a train.”

Sarah showed the police her own message from the doctor, though it, too, was from a blocked number. Nina was allowed to look in the lab, though she said the only thing she could find missing was Bettina’s own laptop, which the doctor might very well have with her. Sarah, Nina, and Alessandro were all taken to the station to make statements. They filled out form after form, repeating all their information, and signing reports. Neither the Polizei nor Nina was able to reach Bettina Müller, who, by the end of the evening, was under suspicion of having stolen her own laptop from herself.

“Perhaps she is not getting phone reception on the train,” Nina offered, outside the police station.

“Do you know where she lives?” Sarah asked. “I’m sorry. I’m really not a crazy stalker. It’s just that I urgently need to speak with her. She did invite me to the lab tonight. . . .” If she had even sent that message.

“I don’t.” Nina raked her fingers through her pink hair. “Somewhere near the Naschmarkt, I think. She always breakfasts there. Shit. But, look, she should be back by Friday at the latest. That’s when our team always meets. And there is a concert that night, at the Konzerthaus. She never misses when Kapellmeister Schmitt is conducting.”

“I’ll stay till then,” Sarah said, frustrated. “Maybe she’ll be back in touch.”

In the morning, Alessandro left to teach his class on synaptic connections, and Sarah decided to breakfast at the Naschmarkt, an open-air market near the Secession Building.

A year ago, Sarah thought, as she made her way down the wide boulevard of the Museumstrasse, she would have been thrilled just to be in Vienna. The summer she’d been invited to Prague to catalog Beethoven’s papers for Max, she had planned to visit Vienna until Prague had nearly consumed her, literally. Now she figured she could use the time waiting for the return of Bettina to explore the city, visit all the places where Beethoven had lived. (Though that might take more than two days. Beethoven was a notoriously bad tenant and had lived in nearly seventy different apartments.) She could go to the Lobkowicz Palace here, where the Eroica had premiered. She could visit Beethoven’s grave in the Central Cemetery.

Sarah stopped in front of the Secession Building. Sporting clean classical lines, it thumbed its nose at the huge and heavy Baroque, Gothic, and Renaissance pastiche that surrounded it. The gold filigree ball atop the building was commonly thought to look like a cabbage, but Sarah thought it looked sort of like a golden brain. She paid her admission fee and made her way downstairs to see Klimt’s famous Beethoven Frieze—inspired by Luigi’s “Ode to Joy” and painted for a 1902 exhibition that was an homage to the composer. Painted on thin plaster, it had never been intended to outlast the 1902 show, but had ended up being sold, cut into seven pieces, and stored in a furniture depot for twelve years before being sold again, this time to an industrialist and patron of Klimt, August Lederer. Conveniently for the Nazi leaders who “collected” art, the Lederer family was Jewish, and so the Nazis dispossessed them in 1938 of their extensive Klimt holdings, including the frieze. After the war, ownership of the frieze returned to the current heir of the Lederer family, living now in Geneva; but conveniently for Viennese art lovers, an export ban was placed upon it. Eventually, in the 1970s, the heir sold the frieze to the Austrian government, probably because at that point it was desperately in need of repair and the sale was the only way to save it. A tragic history for a work that had been inspired by a symphony meant to celebrate the equality and brotherhood of man. But at least everyone could look at it now. For a fee.

The mural encircled the whole room and was observed from an elevated platform. A pair of stylish Brazilian women were taking pictures of the frieze with their phones when the guard’s back was turned, apparently intending to reproduce it in a master bath. The frieze’s narrative began on the left wall: female robed figures, eyes closed, floating with arms outstretched in front of them. Genii, Sarah read in the pamphlet. “Yearning for Happiness.” The women looked like they were dreaming.

Sarah’s own dreams the night before had been filled with the sound of Pols’s horrible coughing. Coughing that had taken on a three-quarter-time melody, as if to rebuke Sarah for every step she had waltzed the night before.

She focused now on three supplicating naked figures in the panel before her, a kneeling man and woman, and a girl behind them. They were pleading in front of a knight in golden armor, turned away from them in profile. Behind the knight were two more female figures. The brochure identified them as “Ambition and Compassion.” Sarah found it hard to look at the simple figure of the naked girl. She looked resigned, as if she didn’t much expect the golden knight would help her.

The next panel was titled “Hostile Powers.” Skeletal gorgons with snaking golden jewelry, a naked crone with pendulous breasts lurching behind them, and a lascivious siren with tendrils of long red hair, legs bent and pulled up to her chest, watched over by a richly garbed procuress. In the center, a giant, black, winged, gorilla-like beast with mother-of-pearl eyes and jagged, broken teeth.

Sarah thought about the hostile power threatening Pols. Not a huge hairy monster with wings, but something too small to be painted. A defective chromosome. It would be easier, Sarah thought, glancing back at the knight in armor, if the threat were something she could pick up a golden sword and take a satisfying swipe at.

In the final panels of the frieze, the Arts (more floating women, and one with a lyre) led to the higher plane, where Man and Woman embraced in a mystical union and a chorus of stylized women sang. Sarah contemplated this for a while. She had never really thought of the Ninth Symphony in terms of visual images. Did she agree? Was this what the “Ode to Joy” looked like? No. It was too artificial, too sensual, too . . . pretty. Beethoven, she thought, would not have cared for it.

Thinking this made her intensely lonely for Beethoven. It was absurd to “miss” Beethoven, but she did. The Westonia-drug-fueled visions where she had seen the great man, heard him speak, seen him play . . . they had changed her forever. She had felt connected to him so profoundly. And now here she was, in a place where there should be traces of him everywhere, looking at art that supposedly honored him. And he was invisible to her.

Sarah left the museum and headed to the Naschmarkt, feeling melancholy, which wasn’t helped by a drizzle of cold rain. She ordered a mélange, the Austrian equivalent of a latte, and a Topfengolatsche, which was Austrian for “You have gone to pastry heaven. You’re welcome.” Sugar inspired, Sarah wondered if maybe Nina Fischer knew of any similar work to Bettina’s being done somewhere else. Sarah thought she had run down every other avenue when she was in Boston, but maybe . . .

Her phone beeped.

I had to leave. My life is in danger.

What the hell?

Dr. Müller? Sarah texted back. Where are you? And how do I know this is you?

After a moment, her phone beeped again. There was a photo of her own cover letter on Pols’s medical records. Then another message.

I can help your friend. Will you help me?