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of musical scholarship with a hammer in her hands.
    “I think someone broke into the apartment,” said Sarah, climbing down. “But I don’t think they took anything.”
    Alessandro made a quick check of his belongings, and returned to confirm that nothing was missing, not even his stash of pot.
    “Why they no take our TV?” he said, insulted. “Is very nice TV.”
    Sarah showed him the strange symbol, but Alessandro had no idea what it meant either.
    “I think what we need is a nice grappa,” he suggested. “Tomorrow you sleep on plane.”
    Aftera grappa, Sarah still had no idea what the symbol meant, who would have put it there, or why. But after two grappas, she didn’t care at all.

FIVE
    O f course they performed a particularly thorough search of her carry-on bag at Logan Airport. Sarah, nursing a serious hangover, stood patiently in her socks and watched the mustachioed officer calmly laying out her stuff on the metal folding table: laptop, camera, iPod, chargers, toiletries, an electrical converter, her favorite Micron pens, a couple of notebooks. Condoms.
    Sarah put on her sunglasses.
    The guard confiscated her toothpaste.
    Sarah stopped at a newsstand to buy a new tube. Digging into her backpack for her wallet, her fingers closed around a strange object. Sarah pulled it out. It was the small copper box the little man had left on her doorstep. She must have thrown it into her bag before she had gone over to Pollina’s house and forgotten about it. Well, at least it hadn’t set off any security alarms. That would have been awkward, since she didn’t even know what was in it. God, what if it were drugs? Her summer would have ended before it began.
    Cautiously, Sarah opened the small box. Inside was a half-moon sliver of something gray. It looked like . . . a toenail clipping.
    “Seriously?” Sarah laughed. She had half a mind to throw i ^ Paniontt in the nearest trash can, but she kind of liked the box. Sarah shoved it deep into her backpack.
    Unexpectedly, her ticket put her in first class. Sarah had never flown first class. She hadn’t done much traveling in general. Instead of watching the in-flight movies, she picked up the guidebook to
Berlin, Prague, and Budapest that
she had grabbed at the airport bookstore. She realized with dismay that the college-student authors had grouped the three cities in a single volume for tourists most interested in their shared culture of beer. There were many suggestions as to how to speak to the police when you were arrested for public drunkenness, but little on local history. At last she found a small section on Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle, with two glossy photographs: one of the exterior, and one of a grand Imperial Hall inside the palace. The building had been known by its present name since the marriage of Polyxena Pernstein to Zdenek, 1st Prince Lobkowicz (1568–1628). And thus the dynasty began, she thought. Hard to believe the family was still around and kicking long after families like the Plantagenets and the Romanovs had disappeared from the society pages.
    Sarah kept reading and learned that in 1618, in what was known as a “defenestration,” Protestant rebels had thrown Catholic Imperial ministers from the windows of Prague Castle, but the ministers had survived the fall, and taken refuge in the adjoining Lobkowicz Palace, where Polyxena had hidden them under her skirts. Those must have been some seriously big skirts, Sarah thought. She flipped to the maps in the back. Prague Castle seemed to incorporate a number of buildings, including several overpriced snack bars that served Pilsner and (the writers deigned to mention) a cathedral.
    Sarah shut her eyes and reclined her seat back as far as it would go, letting her mind drift.
    Beethoven had lived and worked almost entirely in Vienna, but he had made three trips to Prague. The first in 1796, when, like Mozart before him, Beethoven had gone to do the eighteenth-century version of networking.