Complication (17 page)

“Let's call it two hours.”

“Ninety minutes. That's all the time I have.”

“Okay, fine. How did you and Paul meet?”

“A pickpocket.”

“Is this a long story?”

“I don't know. I've never told it before.”

Turned out it was a long story.

“I was working at the gallery,” Vera began. “One day this man
bursts through the door. He's sweaty and his hair is long and sticks to his face. On his arm I can see a tattoo of a cartoon man carrying a big gun.”

“Elmer Fudd.”

“That's the one. What is the meaning of this tattoo?”

I shook my head. “People thought he sounded like Elmer Fudd when he laughed.”

“Paul liked to laugh. He has his own sense of humor, I think.”

“You'd have to with Elmer Fudd on your arm.”

“Do you also laugh like this Elmer Fudd?”

“Mine is more of a Woody Woodpecker.”

“Really? Let's hear it.”

“I'm saving it for something funny.”

She narrowed her eyes, studying me a moment before she resumed speaking. “Anyway, that day he is not Paul but only a man with an odd tattoo. He looks angry, this man. He says, ‘Where the fuck is the fucking little prick hiding at?' These are the first words your brother speaks to me. I tell him I have no idea what he is talking about
.
He says, ‘I'm talking about the little pickpocket prick who stole my wallet. The kid I just chased across the goddamn bridge. I know how it works. Kid comes running in here, you hide him in the basement or wherever like he's Anne fucking Frank, he gives you a cut of the take.' ‘We're an art gallery,' I tell him. ‘We have nothing to do with pickpockets or Anne Frank.' ‘Get my wallet back, I'll double what he pays. Let me punch him in the nose, I'll triple it.'”

Her impression of him was uncanny, the hunched shoulders, the smoke-ravaged half-growl of his voice, even the Southside accent I'd somehow avoided. I'd already started forgetting what he sounded like. Vera clearly hadn't.

“Then your brother, he picks up a vase,” Vera said, fiddling with her cigarettes. With only three or four left in the pack, she'd
evidently gone into full relapse since last night. “Not an artwork, just a cheap thing for flowers, like something you would purchase at Tesco or Bílá Labut. He picks up this vase and says, ‘If you don't bring him out by the time I count to three, I'm going to smash the living fuck out of this vase.' I cross my arms, stare at him. ‘One,' he counts. ‘Two.' He looks like a lost little boy. ‘I'm serious here,' he says. A little boy who doesn't know what he is doing but who has gone too far to stop.”

Summed up my brother's past troubles more than she probably knew. The way her eyelids practically fluttered at ‘lost little boy' told me a lot too. Women were always thinking they could settle him down, straighten him out, give him some direction in life. Some of them even succeeded for a few months.

“A couple seconds pass,” she resumes, “and then
WHAM!
He throws the vase to the floor. Big noise, pieces scatter everywhere. He stands looking around like he's not sure what happened. Then he goes running out the door without a word.”

I checked to see how many of my ninety minutes have passed, noticed my watch was still set to Chicago time. Right about now I'd be figuring out how to kill ten or forty minutes on the Internet before heading out to lunch. Looking at my watch did me no good anyway because I couldn't remember when our ninety minutes started. Time did strange things here.

“The next day I told my boss that I knocked over the vase when cleaning. An accident. He tells to me a lecture about what it means to be careful. My boss Gustav, he likes to make lectures.”

I felt a little sick. I thought of Gustav laying there on the edge of the canal, his arm twitching, blood pooled around his head. I felt a little sicker.

“A couple days later your brother comes back. Just before closing. He looks . . . what's the word? Like a sheep. Sheepish. He tells me that he has come to pay for the vase. I say this is not
necessary. He takes a pile of money out of his pocket and spreads it on the counter. Like a card dealer. Its over thirty-five thousand crowns. Nearly what, two thousand U.S. dollars? Put it away, I tell him, it was just a mistake, a misunderstanding. He says to me if I won't take his money, will I let him buy for me dinner? So I agreed. What can I say, I thought he was funny.”

“They ever catch the pickpocket?”

She lit a cigarette. “That's the best part. Your brother found his wallet in another pants, where it had been always. There never was any pickpocket.”

Just then a waiter arrived. I hadn't even noticed that we'd gone unattended since being seated. Vera ordered for both of us and dispatched him without further ceremony.

“Two thousand dollars is a lot of cash,” I said. “What did Paul do here? Where did he work?”

She dragged on her cigarette and frowned. “He was an ambassador, he tells to me. The Ambassador of Awesome. Or he would say he worked on behalf of the International Brotherhood of Kicking Ass. When I got tired of his joking and tried to make him be serious, he would get angry. Why it was important? People were not their jobs. As for money, he didn't always have money. Often he was broke.”

Paul could never hang on to money. I knew he'd used my dad's credit card to buy his plane ticket to Prague, an act I would have caught holy hell for, but with Paul all was forgiven. Dad was always sure Paul could make something of himself, he just needed a fresh start. About every two or three years, as it turned out.

“Did my brother have many friends here?”

Vera considered. “He knew many people. Prague 1 or Prague 8, it didn't matter; when we went out people would know him. His mobile was always ringing. Paul would answer, say a few words, hang up. Or he would look at the caller screen and not answer. He
rarely introduced me to people who came up to him in a club, or on the street. I thought there were reasons. I didn't want to know these reasons.”

“Where did he live?”

“With me.”

“With you where?”

“Is it important?”

“You said you'd answer my questions.”

“In Smíchov. At my apartment. South from here, on the other side of the river. We'd only been together maybe two weeks when he moved in.”

So I'd been right. They were in a relationship, a serious one from the sound of it.

“He had only one suitcase. But he would come and go. Like having a cat. Where he stayed when he wasn't with me, I don't know.”

“Weren't you curious?”

“Of course.” She looked away and snubbed out her cigarette. “Even now sometimes I wonder if we would have been together much longer. What would've happened to us.”

“How long were you together?”

“Nearly one year. It seemed longer. Also shorter. Being with Paul, there was always something happening, you know? He had so much energy he didn't know what to do with. Like something was missing for him. Always he was looking for this something. And this can wear you out. It can wear out the people around you. They never know what you're about, what to expect. Does that make sense?”

“You're saying he was undependable.”

“Not really what I meant. But yes, he could be undependable. But also dependable. Big things yes, little things no.”

“So dependable or undependable, depending?”

“Paul would die for me,” she said. “This I knew in my heart. This I know still. In this way I could depend on him. I could believe in him. But when he said he would meet me at the theater at 7:30? Or when he promised to pick up bread on the way over? This I could never believe. And normal relationships are full of little things like this, you know? More small things than big ones. Not that maybe our relationship was so normal. But I wanted it to be. I wanted to make us normal.”

As she spoke I wondered whether he had in fact died for her without her even knowing it. I'd been thinking a lot about those bloodstains found on his shirtsleeve. Soros thought it meant Paul had been victim of some ritualistic serial killer who liked hacking off people's hands. But wasn't the blood also possible evidence that he'd been tortured? And why? Maybe because the mysterious Martinko Klingáč was trying to get Vera's identity out of him?

There was no way I could bring up this theory with Vera, just as there was no way I could tell her what had happened at the Galleria Čertovka earlier that morning or ask if she'd ever heard of the Right Hand of God. She was still my only real link to Paul, the only person who knew him as anything other than a disappeared body, even if she'd already determined our association would dissolve in less than ninety minutes. But I wondered if she knew about the bloodstained shirt. If so, why hadn't she mentioned it? If not, how could she be so sure that Paul was murdered in the first place?

The obvious answer was that she was in on it.

That she had set him up.

I didn't want to believe this. I couldn't rule it out.

“Whose idea was it to steal the watch?” I said.

She lit another cigarette. I found myself craving one even though I'd quit years ago when the price crept over five dollars a pack, reasoning you can only be expected to pay so much to kill
yourself. “One day Paul came home with a page from the newspaper,” she said. “This was not like him. Especially because this newspaper was in Czech, and he cannot read Czech. This is in May I think, maybe June. I remember it was before your brother's name day.”

“His what day?”

“In Czech Republic everyone has a name day,” she said. “Like a birthday. Paul's Czech name would be Pavel, so his name day is sometime in June. Anyway, he handed me the newspaper. It had been folded many times. Like he's had it in his pocket. One paragraph is circled in red. He hands the paper to me and says, ‘This is where you work, right?' This newspaper story is about art shows for the fall and summer. The paragraph he circled is for something called
Rudolf's Curiosities
. I tell to him, yes, that's where I work, so what? Paul smiles and puts the newspaper back in his pocket.”

A loud hiss issued from behind the counter as a barista heated milk, the steam rising and obscuring her face, rendering her momentarily headless. Vera went on to explain that two, maybe three weeks passed before he made mention of the Rudolf Complication again. Then one night riding the tram home after they went drinking with some of her friends in some unpronounceable Prague suburb, he asks what she would do with a million dollars.

First she laughs. He asks again. She says she sees no point in imagining impossible scenarios. But Paul tells her this question is not hypothetical. They could each have a million dollars—more than a million dollars—in two months. He knows a person who will pay $5 million dollars for a certain work of art. One that will soon be at the Gallery Čertovka. All they had to do was steal it, and half the money would be theirs.

I didn't know if $5 million was a ridiculous sum for the watch, and I'm sure Paul wouldn't have either. Pricing work for hire like this was probably tricky. Offer too much, the help will smell a rat,
know they're going to be stiffed or worse. Offer too little, they'll consider cutting out the middleman and taking the piece on the open market. Or maybe if you're someone like Martinko Klingáč dealing with someone like my brother, you just pull a figure like $5 million out of your ass and watch the guy go all swirly eyed.

“I didn't take Paul seriously,” Vera said. “We were both drunk and he is always saying some crazy thing. The conversation moved on and that was that. But a few days later, he starts asking questions. Do we have alarms at the Galleria Čertovka? Do we have security cameras? Are there cleaning people who come when we are closed? Does the door have an electronic lock or are there keys, do we have a safe, what are the busiest times? He'd write down what I said in a notebook. Notes and drawings in this child's notebook with a ridiculous cartoon mouse on the cover. Not a mouse, what's it called, a mole. Krtek the mole. It was an absurd game. I only started worrying when he brought home the gun.”

“A gun? Where did he get a gun?”

“He said, ‘I'm American, we all carry guns. For hunting wascally wabbits.' Always joking, your brother. But I asked was he planning on robbing the gallery with a gun? Because I wouldn't allow this. The gallery owner was a family friend and I would not let Paul put a gun into his face. I got very angry. Paul he says nothing, just listens. Finally he says, ‘I'm not going to pull the gun on him. I'm going to pull the gun on
you
.'”

“And this was Klingáč's idea?”

She shook her head. “Paul's idea. Martinko Klingáč did not know about me, remember. He did not know Paul's accomplice was a person from the gallery. Paul swore to this, and I believed him. Whatever happened, he wanted to protect me.”

“By sticking a gun in your face.”

She explained the plan also called for a witness being inside the gallery when the robbery took place. Not Gustav—they'd
pull the heist during the late afternoon, when he was usually at a pub called the Golden Weaver—but a customer, a tourist, best case a lone female or an old couple. With a witness and a gun, it wouldn't look like an inside job—either to the police, or just as importantly, to Martinko Klingáč. Paul wouldn't tell her much more about the plan because he wanted her to act natural, behave like a person getting robbed. All she knew was that one day, a man in a ski mask would burst in yelling in a language from
Star Trek
.