Complication (21 page)

“What tree? How I am fucking like bark up a tree?”

“I don't think she's your killer. And I don't think she attacked anyone today.”

“The man who does this,” Soros slowly growled, “is the cock-fuck who is killed your brother. The gallery where this coma man is attacked? Today I learn it's five years ago robbed. During the flood, just before your brother disappears. Art stolen. Big art stolen. You know of the Rudolf Complex?”

“Complication. You left the booklet in my hotel.”

“What booklet?”

So it wasn't him. And it wasn't Vera.

Unless he was lying. But then why would he be?

“Maybe you should drop me off. I get car sick.”

“Did already you speak to Bob Hannah?”

“No,” I lied. Because if I said I had, he'd want to know what we talked about, and I'd have to tell him the journalist thought he was mad as a hatter and that I agreed. Then I'd have to explain what mad as a hatter meant.

“We go to see Bob Hannah now,” said Soros. “Talk like friends. Tell to me his address.”

“I don't know his address.”

“Address it's on card I give you.”

“I don't have the card.”

He locked eyes with me in the rearview. “Fuck on me. No card?”

“I left it at the hotel.”

His tongue started probing the inside of his mouth again. He didn't believe me. Whether his distrust was based on anything more than general principle, I couldn't tell. How much had his police friends told him about the art gallery curator?

“We go to his apartment,” Soros said. He started rifling through loose papers on the front seat, came up with a bent yellow sticky note. “Na bojiÅ¡ti 8 #414, Prague 2,” he read. “We go. Have big talk. Make big friends.”

Soros took another swig of Becherovka then tossed the bottle over his shoulder. It missed my head by inches, bounced off the headrest next to me then tumbled down the seat and landed in the empty beer cans with a clatter.

“Sorry,” said Soros. “I forget you are there.”

“What do you say we pull over? Wait out the rain.”

He shook his head. “We see Bob Hannah. This man with a coma, police in his pocket find a business card. Card of Bob Hannah. Like the one I give to you. We find out how this card got to the man in coma. All of us talk like big friends.”

“Isn't this something the police should handle?”

“I am police. Once police, always police.”

Ahead gaped the large mouth of a tunnel. I guessed we were headed south, but couldn't be sure. Just before we went underground my phone started buzzing inside my pants pocket. I slipped it out and checked the caller ID.

BOB HANNAH.

Speak of the devil.

Soros was squinting at me through the mirror. He'd heard the phone. If I didn't answer it, he'd just get even more suspicious. “Jackasses in marketing,” I stage muttered, making a show of
staring daggers into the phone. “Leave for a couple days, fuck-sticks can't find their dicks to piss with.” My words sounded nothing like me. Apparently Soros's swearing was contagious. I clicked open the phone and put it to my ear.

“Sorry to bother you,” Hannah said.

“No bother, Jimmy.”

“No, this is Bob. Bob Hannah. Is this a bad time?”

“Having a great time. Good food, great people over here.”

“I wouldn't call if it wasn't urgent.”

“I'm in a car, Jimmy. Going into a tunnel.”

“I can hear you fine. Can you hear me?”

“Absolutely. With you one hundred percent. In a car.”

He puzzled through it. “Whose car are you in?”

“Yes, we covered that issue earlier.”

Silence for a moment. “Are you with Soros?”

“That's the ticket, Jimbo.”

“What are you doing with him?”

“Just shoot me the text on over.”

“Can he hear you?”

Inside the tunnel it was eerily quiet without the rain pounding the cab roof, so quiet I worried Soros could make out every word Hannah said. There were disadvantages to everybody knowing English when you couldn't speak a second language. Maybe my brother had been onto something with that Klingon idea.

“Just shoot me the text,” I said.

“I'll make this quick,” replied Hannah, not taking my text message hint. “Our chat earlier had me curious. I talked to that journalist friend of mine, the one from
Mladá fronta
. Turns out our detective didn't lose his job over your brother's case. He was dismissed over something that happened when he was StB back in the day. Secret police.”

“That's an interesting development.”

The tunnel lights turned Soros's face a sallow green and revealed a network of broken capillaries pulsing and spreading across his face like some cruel time-lapse montage. I had to look away to concentrate on what Hannah was saying.

“Yes and no,” said Hannah. “Lots of police came from the StB. Police, politicians, entertainers, priests—everyone had ties to the StB. Half the country was busy informing on the other half. But our detective was no mere informant nor StB thug. He was a ranking officer of the most feared institution in the country. Details on exactly what he did are murky, but something in his past spooked someone bad.”

The ex-detective and former StB man kept his eyes on mine in the mirror. I was practically shoving the phone up my ear canal in hopes of muffling Hannah's voice. If Soros had bothered to turn off the windshield wipers when we entered the tunnel he probably would've heard everything. As it was they screeched and whined against the glass, adding another layer of dissonance.

“It gets worse,” Hannah continued. “Not only was Soros's dismissal unrelated to your brother's supposed murder—your brother hadn't even gone missing when it happened. Soros left the police in 1999.”

“This news is not good, Jim.”

“It gets worse.”

Bob Hannah then told me how ex-detective Soros hadn't just sat around collecting his pension and obsessing about the Right Hand of God after leaving the force nearly a decade ago. Instead, he'd spent time working as a black sheriff. “Private security,” Hannah explained, “thugs protecting bigger thugs. His boss was a Slovakian gangster. Con man, pornographer, drug dealer, pimp, arsonist, kidnapper, murderer. A trafficker of women and stealer
of identities. Then he vanished. Just like that. The ÚOOZ—they're the national organized crime unit here, like the FBI—they don't even have a photograph of the guy.”

“This party have a name?”

“Martinko Klingáč. A pseudonym. Means—”

“Rumpelstiltskin.”

Soros's head jerked as if in recognition. We rocketed out of the tunnel and the rain came slamming down on all sides. Hannah said his journalist friend had dug up some documents I might be interested in seeing. He'd be home for the next couple hours if I wanted to come by and pick them up.

As he started to give me his address, I should have found some way to warn the journalist that the StB-turned-police-turned-black-sheriff and I were at that very moment headed his way, and maybe he ought to leave in a hurry. I should have told him that if the Prague police hadn't been in touch yet, they soon would be, because his business card had wound up in the pocket of a comatose art gallery curator.

But I never got the chance.

Soros had turned half around in his seat now, eyes glassy slits, mouth clamped in a shriveled hyphen, and I saw the shape ahead before he did.

In the middle of the road, maybe sixty feet distant, a small figure in red.

A little girl with a hackwork of stringy wet hair.

I pointed and yelled, and Soros just kept glaring and the car just kept careening towards her. She must've been crossing the intersection against the light, but now she was just planted in the middle of our lane, frozen by the onrushing headlights, dress dripping wet and hair plastered over her face. She opened her mouth to scream and revealed an expanse of black.

I reached over Soros shoulder and yanked the wheel hard left. The car lurched sideways, my shoulder slamming against the inside of the door, head connecting with the window a split second later with a dull crack before my body was sent sailing into the opposite door as Soros wrestled the wheel back from me.

I didn't know if we'd hit the girl or not. There was no time to wonder. We veered off the road, and I ducked and covered and heard splashing and screaming and brakes squealing and then felt a sudden weightlessness as I pitched forward. Then all sound disappeared. Time slowed. I was on a spacewalk, floating over the backseat as my shoulder dipped and my body rolled. Beer cans drifted slowly in the air around me.
Prague Unbound
came tumbling right past my head, the embossed gold lettering on its cover appearing to glow as it caught the light. Then my back slammed against the windshield and time stopped altogether.