I am not sure when I noticed that Prague’s favorite sons—native and adopted—all met grisly ends. Tycho Brahe’s bladder burst and Mozart was probably annihilated by a contaminated pork chop. Kafka lost his voice first and his ability to eat second. Rilke succumbed to leukemia. The self-styled Mother of Cities is distinctly filicidal. No one is entirely sure what killed Dvořák at the age of sixty-two. I told Amanda perhaps we should move to Lausanne.
I became very interested in Brahe, who lost his nose in a duel, kept a dwarf as a jester and an elk as a pet until the elk died descending the manor stairs drunk—surprising, since the elk was accustomed to doing the same every night. Somehow despite the drink and drama Brahe accumulated forty years of astronomical observations that were more accurate and more meticulously gathered than any that were collected by anyone before him, using instruments of his own design incorporating metal instead of wood. In 1601 he died because, according to legend, he had to pee very badly but dared not interrupt his patron the emperor Rudolf II at one of Rudolf’s Prague Castle banquets.
Modern testing of exhumed hair follicles suggested mercury poisoning, but further tests were needed.
I went one afternoon without Amanda to see his tomb in Prague’s main cathedral. A flat marble slab bearing his name in capital letters lay in the floor beneath a vertical life-sized reddish-brown marble relief of him contemplating his own final resting place. He was, in my mind, the first scientist, although that honor is usually accorded to Galileo. I thought the sculptor had caught something, despite the armor, ostentatious mustache, and trappings of nobility; the expression on Brahe’s marble face was that of a man bent on deciphering some new inscrutable evidence. I moved back to get a better look and stepped on a small child’s toes.
No effort was made to hush the child, though there may have been a coordinated campaign to shame the transgressor, beginning with parental glares, spreading through surrounding bystanders. I apologized to the mother, and when that didn’t work, the father, and when that failed, the child herself—a blonde girl of three or four, now swept into daddy’s arms—who saw or heard me and buried her face in her daddy’s chest, covered both ears, and howled in renewed protest. The vaulted ceiling, acoustically designed to make human voices mimic the chorus of heaven, failed to oblige. Without breaking her glare at me the child’s mother tugged at the father’s sleeve and they left before I knew what language the girl was bawling in.
“Quite a manipulative child,” said a familiar voice in American English over my shoulder. I spun around to find Valerie laughing at me.
“She could have been a good Christian and offered me the other toes,” I said.
“She gets what she wants,” said Valerie.
“Where is Dave?” I said.
“He was an error,” she said. I didn’t press for elaboration.
“Where’s Amanda?” she said.
“Busy,” I said.
“Then you can help me with my implausible mission,” she said.
“Which is what?”
“Investigating death. If Dave can write for The Prague Post, so can I.”
I started tagging along with Valerie while she looked into, and wrote about, Brahe and Mozart, the phantom chimpanzee of Prague Zoo, the medieval monk who slew a prostitute in rage and himself in remorse on Celetná Street, where an outstanding Italian steakhouse now stands, and—at my suggestion—the nexus of floods, climate change, and carnivorous plants. Some of her work was published, occupying a full broadsheet opinion page with a commissioned cartoon. Kepler, she found, probably didn’t murder Brahe for his data. Mozart, she found, almost certainly died from trichinosis. Subsequent generations of chimpanzees avoided an area of their enclosure where a newcomer was murdered by the alpha male thirty years previously because they didn’t know that the alpha had been destroyed, and they were not spooked, wrote Valerie, merely waiting for the return of their once and future king.
Along the way Valerie told me or intimated that she came from a screwed-up family in a bad neighborhood of a stupid town, and that growing up, she hadn’t known whether she was going to be a hairdresser or a hairdresser. But she did write and publish original journalism without training.
“You’re a self-made woman,” I suggested one day over coffee in a riverside café.
“Everyone here is self-made,” she said. “There is no system for making anybody. No corporate ladder or law school conveyor belt. That’s what makes it all a colossal waste of time.”
“Are you leaving?” I said, alarmed.
“Not yet. I have a stack of graduate school applications to fill out.”
“Where and for what?”
“Monumental debt.”
“You’re dour,” I said.
“I’m not complaining. I’ve enjoyed it, and it beats spinning pizza dough in Davenport. Realistically, do you want to go live with your parents again? That’s where all this ends. I’d love to train as a scuba instructor in Thailand, but that’s just postponing the inevitable.”
“Let’s distinguish between Davenport and living with your parents,” I said.
“Davenport has a bridge I can throw myself off of,” she said.
“So does Prague.”