City of Lost Dreams: A Novel by Magnus Flyte

Author:Magnus Flyte
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780143123279
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2013-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Café 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

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