The Book of Blood and Shadow (24 page)

“You take the good one,” Adriane said, nodding at the bed with slightly fewer stains. A peace offering. “And about what I said last night, it was late and—”

“We were both exhausted,” I cut in before the awkward apologizing could begin. “We were practically talking in our sleep.”

“So, you’re okay with—”

“Everything’s okay,” I said. It didn’t matter anymore who had known Chris better, who had felt obligated and who had felt like an obligation. It didn’t matter, because Chris was gone. “But I think I left something in the lobby.”

What mattered was asking the toothless man behind the desk whether there’d been any messages left for a Nora Kane, and deciphering the code on the small note that he handed me, the code that I now understood and that told me where I should go at midnight. What mattered was that Max would be there, too.

9

“What is it?” I asked Eli as he hesitated in the doorway of the inn. We’d decided to start our search (for information, if not—as Eli and Adriane may have thought—for Max) in the most logical place for any dutiful student of the Hoff’s: the public library. That was where the Hoff had, based on the note I’d found in his office, met a man named Ivan Glockner, and maybe where he’d first learned of the
Hledači
.

According to our map, the library was a simple walk down the hill and across the river into the heart of Staré Město, or Old Town. We were staying on the left bank of the Vltava, up a steep hill from the river, in Malá Strana, a worm’s nest of narrow,
twisting cobblestone streets and alleys; dingy storefronts, with crosses or chalices or marionettes hanging in dingy windows; brown-robed monks strolling beside habited nuns, ushered by bells to one church or another; and shadowing it all, the double spires of St. Vitus Cathedral, centerpiece of Hradčany Castle, former home of the Holy Roman emperor, secular emissary of God himself.

Elizabeth Weston walked these streets, I thought, and my hand crept to my abdomen of its own accord, where beneath my shirt, tucked into the pouch with my passport, was the letter Chris had, just maybe, died to protect.

Eli wasn’t moving. He took a deep breath.

“What?” I said again.

“You know where the name
Prague
comes from?” he asked.

“No. And don’t feel the need to—”

“No one does. Some people think it’s from the word
prahy
, which means
eddies in the river
. Or
na praze
, which is basically a dead, empty place with no shade. But you know which explanation I like the best?
Pražiti
. It means
the cleansing of the forest by fire
. Doesn’t that sound about right? Cleansing, like the fire is doing everyone a favor. Even though all you end up with when it’s done is a dead place with no shade.”

I began to wonder whether jet lag could have hallucinogenic effects.

“I told myself I wouldn’t do this,” he said.

“Slow us down?” Adriane said. “Fail.”

He ignored her and wouldn’t look at me. “My parents spent my whole life preparing me for this. This place, I mean.”

“His parents are Czech,” I told Adriane. “They’re obsessed with the old country.”

“Yeah, I hear life was bliss under the Communists,” she said. “Can’t imagine why anyone ever left.”

“They were kids,” Eli said. “Kids don’t care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade
knedlíky
. It’s home. They didn’t notice the tanks in the backyard and the blood in the streets.”

Even before she spoke, I could tell Adriane had exhausted her limited ability to feign interest. I’d heard Ms. Kato talk wistfully, endlessly, about the lost wonders of her parents’ homeland, a country in which she’d never spent more than two weeks in a row, time that was unfailingly passed in a Ritz-Carlton or a luxury car with tinted windows and a native guide. Adriane didn’t have much patience for anything, but when it came to the ambivalences of immigration, she’d exceeded her limit the year she’d wanted to be a pirate for Halloween or, at the very least, a samurai—her mother had instead stuck her in a kimono. “Not to sound like one of those people, but maybe they should just go back where they came from.”

“That’s supposed to be my job,” Eli said. “That’s what it was all for. I told them it was a waste of their time. I promised myself I would never come here. But … here I am.”

“There’s a way to fix that,” Adriane said.

“Shut up, Adriane.”

I didn’t know why I said it. And judging from her expression, neither did she.

“Let’s go,” Eli said, shaking off whatever held him in place. “Guess you can’t argue with destiny.”

10

The central public library was a depressingly austere block building bracketed by two baroque monstrosities, their elaborate columns, carvings, and pedestals making the “modern” architecture look less forward-thinking than apathetic. We found nothing in
the catalog under
Hledači
or
Lumen Dei
, and no record of anyone named Ivan Glockner working in reference in this library or any other in the greater Prague library system. But the young librarian, who looked more like a college student and—with a skunk streak of neon pink in her hair and jagged gold piercings rimming her left ear—not the kind you’d expect to see in a library, directed us into a room in the basement where rare documents were kept, along with an archivist who supposedly knew “everything about everything.”

The archivist—in all black, with a spiked collar, the perfect Sid to her Nancy—had never heard of Ivan Glockner either, and he came up empty on the
Hledači
and
Lumen Dei
. But when I asked if they had anything about Elizabeth Weston, he disappeared into the bowels of the stacks and reemerged several minutes later with a red folder, a tattered and faded page nestled carefully inside. “Don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but it’s indexed to her name,” he said, his English accented but fluid. “That’s all we’ve got. Try not to touch it.”

He didn’t have to tell me; I knew how to handle rare documents.

It was a large room, but the lack of windows and surplus of dark wood and musty bindings had a claustrophobic effect. The air was heavy and still, and smelled faintly of mold. At one of the three wooden tables, a hunchbacked man bent over a newspaper, his finger tracing the tiny print line by line.

Prudens et innatus fuit tua sagacitas
. The note was short and simple, easy to translate while Adriane stretched out her calves and Eli peered over my shoulder, eyes fixed on the page.

Your instincts were well founded. We have much cause to worry. The daughter, known to us as Elizabeth Weston, has carried her father’s work to Prague. Alone she would be of little
risk, but she has aligned herself with a mechanist, a favorite in the Emperor’s court. Rudolf himself is surely bringing all his demonic power to bear on its behalf
.

They are closing in on their dark goal. Weston’s house in Malá Strana is unguarded, and it will be nothing to gain access. I urge you against leniency on this matter. A mere warning will be ineffective against a girl raised by Kelley, filled with such hubris that she believes the Lord should supplicate Himself to her desires
.

Of course, if this be your decision, we will follow without challenge or hesitation. I have ultimate faith in your wisdom, and the wisdom of the Church
.

Yours in eternal fealty and defense of the faith
.

17 January 1599 Prague
.

The letter was signed with a symbol rather than a name—not the lightning-pierced eye, but two dark slashes of ink that looked more like a sword than a cross.

“We’re wasting time.” Eli slammed the folder shut. “This is useless.”

The archivist shushed him, his look suggesting he suspected we’d been handling his precious documents with ketchup-stained fingers, if not scissors.

Adriane cleared her throat. “I hate to agree with the stalker, but—”

“Fine.” But it didn’t feel useless. Maybe it was knowing Max was so close, that in a few hours I would have him back, that made me so certain we were in the right place, following the bread crumbs to wherever they would lead. Hadn’t they led me to Max?

A voice stopped us on our way back to the main reading
room, a hiss from the old man with the newspaper. He crooked his finger at me, bushy gray eyebrows waggling.

“Slyšel jsem vás,”
he said.

I shook my head.
“Nemluvím česky.”
I recited from memory, cringing with each murdered syllable.
I don’t speak Czech
. (Obviously.)

There was a gurgle at the base of his throat. Magician-like, he pulled a graying handkerchief from his sleeve and hocked a wad of something viscous and yellow into its center, then folded it neatly and slid it back in place. “I said I heard you. You look for
Hledači
. Search for searchers. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

His hand was a map of liver spots, but his grip was surprisingly firm. “Ivan Glockner,” he said. “You search for me.”

“You work here?” Eli asked, looking dubious.

“I am here,” the man, who might have been Ivan or might—and I could tell from the look on Adriane’s face that she was leaning in this direction—have been a lonely and half-drunk old man with excellent hearing and a proclivity to meddle. “This is enough.”

“You know Professor Anton Hoffpauer?” I asked.

“I know many people.”

“We’re going to be late for that, uh,
thing
,” Adriane said, giving me her best
escape the crazy
eyes. “We should go.”

The man hocked another wad of phlegm, then slapped his hand against the edge of the table. So far Prague seemed full of the very young and the very old. I wondered what had happened to everyone in between. “Take my help or leave me be. Your choice.”

“We want help,” I said quickly. “If you can.”

Hair sprouted from his knuckles, significantly blacker than the thin gray tufts curling over his ears and out of his nose. His trembling pen wrote out the letters on the newspaper:
Kostel sv
Boethia, Betlémské náměstí
. “You find Father Hájek. Priest. He tells what you want.”

“Thank you,” I said as he tore off the corner of the page. The name of the church was written over the black-and-white photo of a young girl, cheerful, vacant eyes staring at the camera, like a face on a milk carton.
“Děkuji.”

“This is not right,” the man said, the absence of contractions giving him an oddly prissy air. “You will not thank me.” He turned back to his newspaper like we weren’t there, wrinkled finger tracing the lines—but his gaze wasn’t tracking, was fixed on what remained of the torn photo, the little girl’s hand, holding a sagging stuffed rabbit.

“Probably just a lonely old man,” Eli said as we left the library. “City’s full of them. Wanted someone to talk to, pretended to know something.”

“Or he did know something,” I said.

The Kostel sv Boethia, Church of St. Boethius, wasn’t in my guidebook, but Betlémské náměstí, Bethlehem Square, was. And it was close.

11

The main artery of Staré Město, a diagonal slash across the quarter that efficiently funneled tourists from the Karlův most at one corner to the Powder Tower at the other, had—according to the tour guides we squeezed past, their orange umbrellas held high for the benefit of their obedient herds—once served as a processional path for emperors, kings, and popes, bejeweled eminences of all kinds marching proudly toward the royal palace, dignitaries carried through the streets, sometimes in carriages, sometimes in coffins. It was hard to picture, now that the noble path for heroes and conquerors had become a cobblestone-paved mall.

There were stores selling colored crystal; stores selling knockoff watches, knockoff handbags, knockoff shoes; stores selling presumably bootleg CDs; stores selling matryoshka dolls painted with the faces of presidents, soccer players, movie stars, and, most prevalently, Michael Jackson; stores selling cheap jewelry; stores selling thick Bavarian pretzels and sugared dough roasting on a spit; and most of all, stores selling puppets, their blank wooden faces staring dully through the glass, their limbs contorted by tangled strings, their lips painted into smiles or roars, tears or freckles dotting their apple cheeks—rows and rows of puppet girls and puppet boys, menaced by puppet dragons, wooed by puppet princes, tempted by puppet devils.

Many of these stores were fronted by beggars in ratty clothes, huddled under grimy blankets. Since elementary school I’d been taught to call them, with all due respect, homeless people, but these were undeniably beggars, as if out of a folktale, beggars bent forward on their knees, stretched prone with their faces in the dirt, arms extended and hands clenching a hat containing, in the best of cases, a few loose coins. I didn’t want to stare; I didn’t want to carefully not stare, like the packs of camera-clutching tourists who kept their gazes averted and stepped past them or over them like they were simply wider-than-usual cracks in the sidewalk.

When the street spit us out into a wide square bordered by an ornate clock tower and a church whose spires made it resemble nothing so much as Disney World’s Cinderella Castle, I was glad for the excuse to look up.

Most of the square was filled by an Easter market hawking produce, fried bread, and sausages of various size and color. Having eaten pretty much nothing since Paris but wilted Eurail sandwiches, we sampled all we could. Adriane couldn’t get enough of the
rakvičky
, a narrow, nutty-flavored cookie with a crème center,
which soured in my mouth when Eli translated the name for us:
little coffins
.

“Don’t be so sensitive,” Adriane said, mouth full, her no-carb policy apparently on a spring break of its own. She said it again when we paused beneath the clock tower to get our bearings and overheard yet another tour guide—this one in Renaissance drag, though still holding the telltale umbrella—pointing out the twenty-seven white crosses inscribed in the stone pavement, testament to the twenty-seven Protestants who’d been beheaded on a single seventeenth-century afternoon while the Catholic crowds cheered. Presumably they cheered even louder when, according to the perky guide, the executioners started getting creative, slicing off and nailing unfortunate tongues to the gallows, louder still when the severed heads were carried in buckets down the noble Royal Way and impaled on a tower overlooking the Karlův most, where they watched sightlessly over the city for ten years.