City of Lost Dreams (17 page)

Astounding had been discovering Gerhard Schmitt’s wife draped across Marie-Franz’s couch, still wearing a fur coat.

“I threw myself on Marie-Franz’s mercy,” Frau Schmitt had called out when they came in. “I couldn’t bear to be with any of those horrible sycophants. God! Or all those dreadful public officials. What a ridiculous charade! Marie-Franz, can you make me another one of those lovely drinks?”

So Sarah had left Alessandro to comfort the widow and accompanied Marie-Franz to the kitchen, where the professor was mixing a Viennese specialty of Aperol and Prosecco.

“We shouldn’t mention that we knew Nina, right?” Sarah whispered. “Or Bettina?”

“I don’t know. Most importantly, we should get some food in her, I think.”

But when they returned to the living room, Sarah had only gotten out a “Frau Schmitt, I’m so—” before the widow interrupted.

“Please God, don’t say you’re sorry. And call me Adele. I saw you with her at the ball. The little Nina. She was a friend of yours?”

“An acquaintance, yes. We were friendly.”

“Then it’s me who should be saying I am sorry.” Adele downed her drink. “And I am. In fact, every tear I’ve shed has been for her.”

“You are very compassionate,” murmured Marie-Franz.

“Oh,
you
know,” said Adele. “I don’t have to pretend in front of you. My husband was a
monster
. That poor girl . . .” She began to weep.

Marie-Franz moved to the sofa and put an arm around her. The widow leaned into the much taller woman gratefully for a moment, and then stood up abruptly, pulling a cigarette out of her bag. Alessandro lit it and she patted him on the arm, still crying.

“It could have been anyone,” she said. “My husband had many women. I will be honest with you, I had thought of killing him myself. Now I only feel pity. Even for Bettina Müller, I feel only sorry for her. You are shocked by this?”

“Surprised,” admitted Sarah. So the rumors of an affair were true.

“When my brother’s little boy was so ill, cancer, Bettina worked with his doctors. That’s how Gerhard and I got to know her. She worked around the clock to use the boy’s own cells to create an antibody against the cancer. She warned us it was dangerous, and for a while we thought we would lose him, but last spring he turned thirteen. I truly believe she’s a miracle worker. How could I hate such a woman?”

As Adele sang the praises of her late husband’s mistress, Sarah wondered if she was giving up too soon.

“She said she would help a friend of mine, but she’s being incredibly strange about it.”

“That’s Bettina all over,” said Adele. “Suffers from terrible paranoias and persecution complexes. It’s that thing, you know, like the man in—what’s that film,
A Beautiful Mind
? The geniuses, they always have some mental hiccups. And she is probably saying she will not help you?”

Sarah nodded.

“She always says that, but it is to fill the time while she is thinking about the cure. She does not want to disappoint. There is a saying that ‘Vienna is a city of people who have missed their vocation,’ but I can assure you Bettina is not one of them.”

Sarah absorbed this. “Someone stole Bettina’s laptop a few days ago,” said Sarah. “She says she needs what’s on it to help my friend. Did you or your husband find it? Or—?”

The widow looked at Sarah and began to cry again, large tears that rolled down her cheeks. “No,” she said. “I know nothing of this. But I will search the apartment when I get home.” She took Sarah’s hands in hers. “I do not want your little friend to die. We have had enough death. Enough pain. It is time to find room in our hearts for love. Let us drink to love.”

As Sarah raised her glass, Alessandro leaned in. “We should leave now to grab your bag and make the train,” he whispered. “You ready to go?”

She was still pondering this question when they got back to Alessandro’s apartment and found someone waiting for them.

“Darling,” said Nico. “What on earth have you been up to?”

NINETEEN

C
afé Bräunerhof was doing a lively business. The whole city was buzzing with talk of the recent death of the Kapellmeister and Nina. Not that Nina was being talked about so much. She was just “
das süsse Mädel
”—“the sweet girl”—of an important, wealthy man. Who really cared about her? The girl had no family, and what little she had didn’t want to claim her.

Heinrich nodded to a few members of the city’s industrial elite, who were poring over the
Financial Times
,
Il Sole 24 Ore
, and the
Wall Street Journal
. He bit into a
Punschkrapfen.
His brother would be meeting him soon. They would talk, and they would talk about family, as they always did.

Heinrich and Gottfried’s mother had made the brothers promise on her deathbed that they would do whatever it took to hold on to their inheritance. She had also made them promise that they would employ a surgeon to surgically stab her corpse in the heart before she was put into the ground. (She had the common Viennese fear of waking up in her own coffin.) It had cost three hundred euros. They had done the same thing for their father, too, although the bullet Father had put through his own brain had taken most of his head off.

Their estate had been in their family since Archduke Ferdinand had conferred it on the von Hohenlohes in 1570. Land and an estate that, sending his mother spinning in her grave, would be sold to an American entrepreneur in a matter of months if Heinrich wasn’t able to turn things around. The American entrepreneur had made his fortune in infomercials. According to
Fortune
magazine, the American was “the
Emperor
of Infomercials,” a phrase that had made Gottfried apoplectic.

“They call this man an emperor because he has sold collapsible colanders and nose hair clippers?” his brother had fumed.

“They call him an emperor because he has sold a
billion
collapsible colanders and nose hair clippers,” Heinrich had explained. “Also zirconium jewelry, plus-size swimwear, robotic vacuum cleaners, a device that allows you to hang wallpaper very smoothly, a brassiere that can be inflated or deflated—”

“We are descended from not one but two Grand Masters of the Teutonic Knights,” Gottfried interrupted, lifting his chin. “They fought in the Crusades.”

“And they fought valiantly and well.” Heinrich knew the story went faster when you played along.

“You’ve seen their armor in the Neue Burg, the dents, the scratches. And this is what you propose as
our
course of action?”

The thought that his own brother looked down on him twisted Heinrich’s stomach, which was already doing battle with a combination of goose liver, Zimtstangerle, and rum-soaked cake frosting.

Gottfried was not only the heir, the scion of their house, but he was the gifted one, the one with brains and talent and charm. Even his epilepsy was considered a sign of his nobility, having been inherited through the Hapsburg line. A line that also carried notable examples of insanity.

Gottfried planned on having children as soon as he found a woman who met his breeding standards, which involved dental records, genealogy, a lengthy questionnaire on Austrian history, and a 5K timed run. And Gottfried intended his eventual sons to inherit the von Hohenlohe estate, as they had, and their father before them. But the estate needed to be saved, first.

Gottfried had become a rider at the Spanish Riding School and Heinrich had taken a job—his forebears would have shuddered at the word—as a consultant with a pharmaceutical company, telling people that his family had a long connection to medical innovation through Philippine Welser. But the truth was neither of the brothers was as interested in Philippine as they had been in their lineage of Teutonic Knights. Heinrich’s contract was to provide “public relations assistance,” but in reality they had hired him for his connections in Austrian society. As a descendant of the old aristocracy who had attended the best schools (where his mediocre marks were interpreted as a sign of patrician restraint, not dimwittedness), he could weasel his way into conversations with high-level Austrians anywhere and sniff out any developments that might be interesting to his employer. They called it “research,” but it was really gossip, which came naturally to Heinrich.

Then the company had come to him, and after praising his discretion and effectiveness, had asked for a very delicate service to be rendered. When they mentioned the sum that they were prepared to remunerate, he had felt his prayers had been answered.

He had agreed to provide such services. There was an EU official to be gently bribed to pass some legislation beneficial to the company, then a little off-the-books banking business in Switzerland. A sensitive negotiation made over a cotoletta at Bice in Milan. Always just gentlemen doing business, of course. As the need for tact and discretion had increased, the rewards had kept pace. But so had the risks.

This latest assignment was not just gentlemen doing business. Since Gottfried was the one so rabid about holding on to their inheritance, Heinrich had damn well asked him to help. Which may have been a mistake. Was certainly a mistake. Yes, things had certainly gotten out of hand. Gottfried’s fantasies had a way of taking over things. Heinrich had some difficult choices to make now.

Heinrich swallowed a second
Punschkrapfen
, then nervously checked his upper lip for traces of pink frosting, as he saw the slim (damn him!) silhouette of Gottfried making his way into the restaurant. Gottfried got all the women: beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated women who slept (Heinrich imagined) in between silk sheets and whose well-tended bodies were lithe and dexterous and who whispered naughty things in educated voices. Nina had refused to sleep with Heinrich, so the last act of sexual congress he had enjoyed had taken place with a middle-aged Laotian prostitute in a 15th district brothel boasting a selection of “internationally themed” boudoirs. The “America” room had been decorated with chuck wagon wallpaper and gingham upholstery. It had been necessary to keep his eyes tightly shut while he screwed, which defeated the purpose. You kept your eyes closed when you fucked your wife, not your mistress. Not that the prostitute counted as a mistress, but still.

Heinrich’s feelings for his brother were as layered as a Viennese pastry. Love, fear, jealousy, hatred, admiration, and resentment. Heinrich suddenly remembered how Gottfried, as a child, would order a Dobostorte in a café and proceed to dismantle it, casting aside chocolate and buttercream and cake to eat the only part he liked: the slivers of caramel.

Yes. That was what Heinrich had to do now. Turn his mind from all those layers of feelings and focus on the one that was most useful. The one that would get them closer to their goal.

There was work to be done. They would do it together.

by

Harriet Hunter, PhD

Y
es, dear readers, there I was, in my coffin, having officially died in childbirth and unofficially by my own hand.

I have thought, from time to time, that I should write a short book on how easy—relatively—it turns out to be to escape from one’s own coffin. It would be a bestseller in Vienna. Of course, some modern coffins are made out of metals like aluminum or steel, and in that case one’s goose would be quite cooked, or asphyxiated as it were. A very painful route.

It is possible that I ran out of oxygen before I freed myself, and another person doing what I did would not have succeeded. My chest hurt at one point quite dreadfully. But I believe my methodology was quite sound and is another example of how well I think under pressure. Six feet of dirt pressure in this case.

My coffin was made of wood, and the pressure of the earth above it crushed an egress around my midsection. They had buried me with my child. The child was dead, truly so. I moved the small body off my chest and removed my heavy dress until I was wearing only my linen shift. I took the crucifix from around my neck and used it to enlarge the hole, packing as much earth as I could within the coffin. I ripped a piece of skirt from my dress and made a loose bag of it around my head in order to keep the dirt from falling in my mouth and nose. When it was possible, I stood up, my arms above me, thrusting myself out of the hole. I leveraged my foot on the coffin and rose to a height where my hands were able to break free of the ground. I could feel cold air on my fingertips.

What a sight it would have been, if anyone had been there to see it.

I had not been buried long. The earth was still fresh, and crumbly. I pulled myself free. It was night. I stood there, covered in dirt and some blood where the wood of the coffin had scratched against my skin. Shivering in the night air.

I did not know what to do next, so I walked home, across the graveyard and then through the narrow streets, slipping into the shadows and hugging the walls whenever I heard footsteps approaching.

At my home, all was still. I thought about waking Johannes. He would scream. They would all scream. And run from the house. What could I do? What had I become? This was well before zombies had entered popular culture, please remember. I thought I might be dreaming.

No. I knew.

I knew I had been wrong. My stepfather had not poisoned my body against childbirth. He had poisoned me against death. He had found the tonic for immortality. The Elixir of Life! If you think masses of people have tried to crack the formula for Coca-Cola—think again. The Elixir of Life was sought for a thousand years by crazy alchemist and king alike—though not by a single woman, I’d like to point out. Had Kelley even known what he had done? How could he? I had never died—or tried to die—until now.

Also, if my stepfather had known, he would never have shut up about it. The man didn’t talk to just angels—he talked to anyone who’d listen. I mean anyone. One-legged beggars ran from the man in the street.

I crept into the house. I could hear Portia coughing her wracking cough from her room. Portia. Portia had wept over my grave. Portia should know that I was still alive. That I would never leave her.

And then the coughing stopped, and the house was still and most terribly silent. I went to my daughter’s room.

Portia was dead.

I
cannot say exactly what happened next. I know one part of my brain continued to behave as perfectly and wonderfully as it had ever done, for later I found myself with clothes, a cloak, a pair of shoes, a knife. Some money. But I was grieving for my daughter, and my grief was perfect and wonderful, too.

I
left Prague. I wandered a very long time. I hid, and I learned, and I waited and I planned. And I lived. On and on and on, I have lived.

Y
ou would think that my grief and longing for my daughter would have lessened over these many years—these centuries. You would be wrong to think so. She is my light in the darkness. Portia. Waking or sleeping, she is my dream.