The Book of Blood and Shadow (32 page)

She told us all that but would tell us nothing about the
Lumen Dei
. Not where she had heard of it, nor how. Not why mention of it had persuaded her to help us, even though the words, each time we repeated them, turned her face a lighter shade of pale until, with a convoluted set of hand motions to (I assumed) ward off the evil eye, she forbade us to utter them again.

After hours, the Alt-Neu Synagogue was empty, lit only by dim bulbs that mimicked the orange flickering of candlelight. I’d had an art teacher once whose favorite line was that Michelangelo’s sculptures were living inside each block of stone; he needed only to let them out. That was how the temple felt, with its curving off-white stone walls and the prayer benches that bloomed from them. As if the building had sprouted from the earth, fully formed. Notre Dame, the Kostel sv Boethia, these had felt old and—even to me—somehow sacred. But they’d also been fearful and imposing, with their elaborate stained glass, gilded statues,
towering spires, scowling gargoyles, and impossibly tall stone pillars all working in tandem to make you feel dwarfed, inconsequential,
human
. I could understand how people who lived in squat wooden houses, who pissed in gutters and spent their sixteenth-century days shaping metal or cobbling shoes or begging for scraps, could, confronted by the mountain of glass and stone and gold, have no choice but to believe their lives had been shaped by divine forces, because what else but a divine force could turn stone, glass, and mortar into
that
? The temple felt different. Older, though it wasn’t. Old like the desert; old like Jerusalem. Maybe it was the sand-colored walls or the warm glow of false candlelight, or the lack of a gilded altar—here there was only simplicity, an embroidered tapestry covering the ark. It was unsettlingly easy to imagine an earlier time, a bearded man supine before the ark, begging his God for the power to refute death.

Janika ushered us past two security guards—“Golem,” she said, and they winked—and up a narrow flight of stairs, into the synagogue’s attic, a musty, surprisingly cramped space with sloping walls and eight centuries’ worth of accumulated spiritual detritus.

“This is it,” she said. “You look, as many have looked before you. There is nothing here.”

“Thank you so much,” I said.

She coughed, a dry, hacking smoker’s cough. “Don’t break anything.”

We dug through layers of rusted menorahs, moth-eaten linens, dusty tomes in ancient languages. Each of the walls was examined carefully for secret niches, a loose brick or hidden doorway that might relinquish a treasure.

Janika stood in a corner, fingers twitching like they would have been more comfortable holding a cigarette, or at least a stick, watching us carefully and offering the occasional pronouncement on the mildewed curiosities.

A tarnished silver menorah bearing the candle wax of Hanukkahs past: “Menorah belonging to Kafka’s great-grandparents. Don’t touch.”

A slim, rectangular stone box, only slightly wider and longer than my index finger, each end molded into the face of a child. “Mezuzah belonging to the Maharal’s daughter. Don’t touch.”

A squat cup of blackened silver, engraved at its base with Hebrew: “Kiddush cup belonging to the Tosafos Yom Tov. Don’t touch.”

Looking for something was hard enough when you didn’t know what you were looking for; harder still when, deep down, you didn’t believe that it existed. I peered out the window, as if the rooftops of Prague would offer an answer. But the slate and stone were silent. Below me, a set of iron rungs marched halfway down the exterior of the church, forming a makeshift ladder. The window was unlocked and, with the gentle pressure of only my index finger, eased itself open. An escape route, I thought.

“Enough,” I said. We’d covered every crack and cranny. “There’s nothing here.”

“We can’t give up,” Max argued.

I lowered my voice so Janika wouldn’t hear. “We don’t even know if we’re looking for the right thing—maybe we were wrong about what Elizabeth meant.”

Max grabbed my arm. “Do you understand what’s happening here?” He squeezed. His nails dug into my skin. “This isn’t for fun.”

“Who’s having fun?” Adriane said lightly.

“I know that,” I told him.

“But you just want to give up.” Max squeezed tighter. “Like you don’t care what happens.”

“Let go of me.” I would not raise my voice.

“It’s here, and we can find it. We
need
it.”

“Max.
Let go
.”

He looked down, as if surprised to see himself holding on. He let go, and we both stared at the red marks his fingers had left behind on my skin. No one spoke. I couldn’t look at any of them.

“Be careful,” Eli said finally. I didn’t know which one of us he was talking to.

Max looked ready to spit. “Shut up.”

“You know what?” Adriane looped an arm around Max’s shoulders. “You and I are going outside, where we will have a deep, meaningful conversation on the merits of stress relief and not turning into a brooding psycho on us, because pop-cultural opinion notwithstanding, that is distinctly not hot. Come.”

I braced myself for him to argue, or worse, but instead, he dropped his head, like a nod he couldn’t be bothered to finish, and left with her.

“He’s not usually like this,” I said.

Eli didn’t answer.

“He’s actually never like this,” I added. “He’s under a lot of pressure.” I was fully aware of how lame it sounded. What had they done to Max in that basement that left him so angry and desperate? And why did I keep saying exactly the wrong thing, when I was supposed to be the one who knew him best? He’d actually left the building to remove himself from my presence, and the worst part: When he had, I’d been relieved.

Eli shrugged.

“Well?” I said. “Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

“You don’t want me to say something.”

“And that suddenly stops you?”

“You’re not very good at making excuses,” he said. “Which is strange.”

“Why is that?” I asked before I realized that the right response would have been to deny that I was making excuses, or that Max needed them.

“Because it seems like you must have had a lot of practice.”

“This may be a tough concept for you to grasp, but that’s what you do when you love someone.”

He sighed. “No, Nora. It’s not.”

Before I could argue, he turned abruptly to Janika, still in her corner, taking everything in.
“Děkuji,”
he said.

“Yes, thank you for taking us up here even though you warned us it was pointless,” I told her, keeping a careful distance from Eli. I just wanted to get away from him, and to find Max. “
Děkuji
. I hope you don’t get in trouble or anything.”

“You run around Praha asking stupid questions about
Lumen Dei
”—she made those convoluted hand gestures again, and I caught a
keyn aynhoreh
murmured under her breath, my grandmother’s favorite method for warding off the evil eye—“and you worry about me?” She laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “Trouble will find you. Be sure.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked, fed up with all the vague warnings. “If you know something, can’t you just tell us?”

“When I am young, every child knows the
Lumen Dei
,” she said, looking past us into some middle distance of her past. “My father learns from his father, who learns from his father, and the lesson is passed down.”

“What lesson? You mean you know how to build it?” Eli said. “Or what it does?” There was doubt in his voice, but beneath it, something else. Fear?

She shook her head. A few more wiry curls sprung free. “In English, you say that curiosity killed the cat, yes?”

I nodded. “That’s not exactly my philosophy, but—”

“Yes,” Eli said. “That’s what we say.”

“Here, we say
kdo je moc zvědavý, bude brzo starý
. You understand this, yes?” She aimed a spindly finger at Eli. “You are Czech, I see that.”

“I’m American.”

“Do you understand it or not?” I asked.

“ ‘If you’re too curious, you’ll get old sooner,’ ” he said. “Too soon. Is that it?”

She gestured to herself with a rueful smile. “I was once
moc zvědava
, you see?”

I smiled back, unsure whether or not this qualified as a joke.

“It is possible to know too much,” she said. “
Lumen Dei
, the machine that sees through the eye of God. This is too much.”

“We’re not planning to
use
it,” I said.

“You seek it.”

“Not because we’re curious.”

“You seek it, and so they will find you.”

“The
Hledači
? Yeah, we’ve figured that one out.”

She squinted. “
Hledači
? This is what?”

Now I was confused. “They’re the ones who … Wait, what did
you
mean? Who will find us?”

“Fidei Defensor,”
she said in a hushed voice.

“ ‘Defender of the Faith,’ ” I translated. “Some kind of church group?”

“They were born of the Church,” she said. “But they are not of the Church. They are alone, and they are everywhere.”

“So they defend Catholicism or something? Like the Crusades?”

“They defend
faith
,” she corrected me. “Man is not meant to know God. We
believe
, we do not
know
. Eve knew this, before the serpent. The
Lumen Dei
is a serpent. An apple. The
Fidei Defensor
protect man from himself.”

“Like I said, we’re not planning to use the thing,” I said.
“Though even if we were, and even if it worked”—and even if there were a God, I added silently, suspecting this wasn’t the best audience for that particular train of thought—“why would they care? They love ignorance, so I’m stuck with it, too?”

“Some things are not ours to know,” she said harshly. “For the
Fidei Defensor
, it is
kdo je moc zvědavý, bude brzo mrtvý
.”

“ ‘Too much curiosity will make you sooner dead,’ ” Eli said. “Excuse my language, but that’s
hovadina
!”

From the way he spit out the word—and the way she flinched—I had a couple good guesses as to its meaning.

“I’ve heard of the
Fidei Defensor
,” he said. “They were a fringe group back in the Renaissance, and they all got slaughtered in the Thirty Years’ War. I doubt we’ll piss them off enough for them to rise from the grave.”

“Now you’re an expert on defunct religious sects?” I said.

“Obsessed family, remember?” he said. “So trust me when I say this is one group of nutcases we don’t have to worry about.”

“Hovadina? Hovadina!”
Janika was muttering.
“Americani si myslí, že sežrali všecku moudrost světa.”

“I think you offended her,” I whispered.

She opened the attic door. “You leave now, yes?”

“Why did you help us, if you think this is so dangerous?” I asked.

“Moc zvědava,”
she said, shaking her head. “My father tells me this again and again. I am no good at listening. Also …” She stretched out a hand, palm up, fingers stretched wide, but didn’t continue.

“Also what?” Eli asked finally.

“One hundred American dollars, the rude one said.”

I turned to Eli, who looked through his wallet and sighed. “Thirty?” he suggested. “I can’t afford any more now, but if you give us your address—”

“Thirty,” she said firmly, but stopped short of taking the bills. Up close, her eyes were the murky gray-blue of a storm cloud, and I finally saw what I’d been looking for, the evidence that she’d once had a future, rather than a past. “Remember,” she said. Her hand reached out, and for a moment I feared she was going to stroke my cheek or cup my chin, but it dropped away without making contact. “There is darkness in this city. And for our people, it will always be worse. When the darkness comes again, they will want your blood.”

“Nora has nothing to be afraid of,” Eli said, and pressed the money into her hand.

Janika pocketed the bills without taking her eyes off me. “You know he lies.”

26

“I’m sorry about today.” Max sat on one side of the bed; I sat on the other. There was, in this claustrophobic room, nowhere else to sit. All day, I had waited for this moment, the two of us alone. I had waited for his soft touch and the apology I knew would accompany it; he would be sorry and I would be sorry and, canceling each other out, we would be right again.

I reached across him and switched off the light.

“I’m just scared for you,” he said. “We need to finish this. It’s the only way we’ll ever be safe.”

Safe. At least until the next knife flashing in the shadows, or the next car crash, the next botched burglary, the next Ebola outbreak, the next heart attack. There was no safe. Finding this machine, bargaining with the
Hledači
, going home, nothing would change that.

“Please don’t be mad,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“You’re a terrible liar.” He kissed my neck. “I love that about you.”

“I’m not lying. I’m …”

“You can tell me. Anything.”

“I don’t know.” How was I supposed to tell him that I wasn’t mad about what he’d done, but what he hadn’t? Hadn’t saved Chris. Hadn’t stayed to save me. Hadn’t made everything all right again just by putting his arms around me and promising it would be.

“The postcard, on Andy’s grave,” I said, without intending to. “How did it get there?”

“I told you, we don’t have to talk about any of that.” He leaned against me, whispering, “ ‘What’s past is prologue; what to come, in yours and my discharge.’ ”

I could feel him smiling. This was our game; it was my turn.

I didn’t play. “I want to know.”

“Shakespeare,” he said. Still trying.
“The Tempest.”

And then he gave up. “I set up a dummy account and emailed a guy in the dorm who’ll do anything for cash. Sent him the money and the postcard, and I guess he came through.”

“You emailed him.”