Complication (25 page)

Was-Kelley brushes against the horse as he struggles to his feet, and the nag lurches and whinnies as if snake bitten. Was-Kelley tries to calm the animal but it rears, front legs wheeling at the sky. When the horse comes down, the reins jerk taut, and the gypsy driver is tumbled from his carriage perch. He lands in a graceless heap but does not cry out nor attempt any movement. One naked eye gazes skyward, the other already picked clean by carrion. Beneath the beard the man's face is swollen and his neck black with buboes. A victim of the plague. Inside the carriage, his passengers are likewise unmoving and silent, and Was-Kelley understands they have been travelling dead upon this road for hours or days, understands that Madimi has brought them here. Like him they have become her servants.

Was-Kelley searches the man's garments and finds a stag horn–handled dagger lashed to his waist and a sow's ear coin pouch around his neck. He takes both into his possession and then wobbles to a stand with the aid of the high wagon wheels. Peering inside the coach he finds three women so withered and wild in their attire that they look not like inhabitants of the earth and yet are on it. Each corpse is swathed in a refulgent pandemonium of color, and each looks more lifeless than the last, as if the bodies had been arranged by the hour of their death. Was-Kelley opens the caravan door, climbs into the vacant carriage seat opposite these fellow travelers, and settles in for a long journey. The whitish sun moves unhurried across the sky as the gray nag snorts and the cart shudders into motion. Fifty miles distant, Prague awaits.

M
y brother broke his leg when he was seventeen, the year my mom left us. Fractured his fibula just above the ankle. Paul said he and some of his friends had been playing football, that he went up to catch a pass and just came down wrong. It was a Saturday night in late December while we were on Christmas break, and there were six inches of snow on the ground. Not the fluffy kind, either, but the week-old, frozen-solid and sculpted-by-the-wind variety. Snow nobody in their right mind would play football on. And though my brother's friends were often not in their right minds, they would never be out tossing a pigskin around in December when they could be holed up in somebody's basement, huddled around a bong while listening to Soundgarden.

The football story was bullshit, but whatever really happened had spooked Paul. He spent Christmas break and most of the month that followed hanging out in his room acting sullen and withdrawn. In the Christmas pictures from that year, Paul is mostly absent but where present, his leg cast gleams an overexposed, ghostly white. He wouldn't let anybody sign it, kept a sock stretched over the thing at all times. But when he got the cast
sawed off and the halved plaster was lying in the garbage can at the hospital, I saw he'd written something on it. Magic markered in plain block letters were the words:

I imagined him lying down in bed, hands clasped behind his head, cast foot propped on pillows, meditating on the phrase in between staring at the ceiling listening to his headphones or watching
River's Edge
, a film he was obsessed with that year. I didn't understand what these words meant to him, didn't know how to bring something like that up to my little brother. In a college philosophy course two years later, I came across the quote in a unit on Nietzsche. It's a safe bet my brother wasn't reading Nietzsche. Where he saw the quote, what it meant to him, and how he really broke his leg, are just a few of the hundreds of things I'd never know.

We contain multitudes, went some other quote.

We are each one of us a gathering of strangers.

 

 

S
omehow I managed to land on the street beneath Bob Hannah's apartment without breaking any bones of my own. I'd escaped with only a sprained ankle, nothing too bad, but I knew I'd be limping for a couple days when I got back to the States.

Because that was the plan. Go straight to the airport, get on the next available plane. Given that two of the last four people I'd spoken to were now either dead or comatose, I liked my odds better picking through the contents of the accordion folder back in the Windy City. If there was anything useful, I could always come back, make inquiries through the proper channels. I was done playing sleuth.

The plan had one problem, though. My passport was still back in the safe at the Hotel Dalibor. I had just enough cash for a cab
and caught one near Můstek station. When we reached the hotel, I paid the cabbie but told him to wait, that I'd be right out. He nodded and smiled in kind of a blank way, and I hadn't even made it to the hotel entrance before he sped off. I limped through the lobby toward the front desk to ask the clerk to call me another cab, but he was busy checking in some visibly irritated couple laden with enough suitcases to stage a small-scale invasion, so I just headed for the elevator.

Its interior had too many mirrors, and none of them had kind things to say. I forgot which floor I was on for about four seconds then remembered and punched the number three button. The doors had nearly closed when a hand knifed inside. The doors whisked opened again, instantly filling the cab with the smell of alcohol and cigarettes. The new occupant didn't bother hitting any buttons but just slumped against the back wall of the elevator. I shuffled sideways to make room and looked down at my shoes. My dad's shoes, that is. No wait—Bob Hannah's shoes. It was difficult to remember whose shoes I was in at any given moment.

“Who was he?” said the person next me.

Vera's mouth was slanted, her eyes half closed and glistening. Her cheeks were flush, and her head visibly wobbled as she leaned against the mirrored back wall, awaiting my answer. She must have been in the hotel bar, sitting where she could monitor the entrance.

“Who was who?” I said.

“You followed me. You got into car with a man. Who was he?”

“Nobody you want to know.”

That is if she didn't know him already. I watched the numbers light up above the doors. They stopped on three, the elevator opened, and I stepped out. Vera lurched after me down the hall. The ankle was going to be worse than I'd thought. Halfway down the hall she started yelling.

“You lied to me!”

“People are trying to sleep,” I mumbled.

“You promised!” She latched onto my shoulder, taking a fistful of my jacket, trying to spin me around and ripping the fabric in the process. It didn't take much—what with diving in canal, going through a windshield, getting pelted with rain, and serving as a girdle, it had been a tough night for Dad's last black suit. Vera lowered her voice. “You said you would speak to no one.
You promised me.”

“That was before certain facts came to light.”

“Oh? Just what is it you think you know?”

I shook her off, kept moving down the hall.

“He is a policeman, isn't he?”

“Used to be,” I said. “Not any more.”

“I've seen him. At the Black Rabbit.
Ježíš Maria
, I knew he was a policeman.”

“That a criminal thing, knowing how to make cops?”

“What do you mean?”

“You've had some scrapes with the law, no?”

“Scrapes? What did your policeman tell you?”

“Does it really matter at this point?” We reached my room. I shifted the accordion folder and
Unbound
under my arm as I dug through my pockets to find my key card.

“What did he say?”

“That you were involved in a drug ring.”

“A drug ring? My God, no. Just some stupid friends when I was young. It's absurd to call this a drug ring. What else did he say?”

I slipped the key card into the slot and the door clicked opened and I went inside. Part of me wanted to slam the door in Vera's face. Paul had been dead for five years, and I'd done just fine with his death being an accident. Done fine without the Black Rabbit or the Rudolf Complication or the Right Hand of God
or Martinko Klingáč. I had Vera to thank for all of them, and I'd have done just fine without her, too.

She followed me inside as I groped around for the light, my hand skittering moth-like over the wall. Vera moved past me and emerged on the other side of the room, pushing aside the curtain, bringing in the moonlight, the murky sonata of water cascading over the rooftops, streaming through rain pipes, spilling onto the streets. Maybe she was checking to see if I had been followed by the cops. Maybe it was a signal to someone below.

Come up in ten minutes.

Bring an empty cake box.

She stood silhouetted at the window, so thin she was nearly an abstract shape. I found the wall switch and threw it on and Vera winced against the light like it had insulted her. It hadn't. She'd look good under a floodlamp or inside a sensory deprivation chamber, which just irritated me more. I made my way to the metal safe containing my passport and valuables. I couldn't remember the combination.

“You want to know about this . . . this drug ring?”

“Not especially.” 12 left . . . 07 right?

“When I was at the university, my boyfriend brought some ecstasy from the Netherlands. Five or six of us were going to go camping in Frymburk. Just hang out by the lake all weekend, have a good time.”

09 left, 27 right . . . 71 left? Nope. Denied. I'd always used birthdates for setting combination codes—mine, Paul's, my father's—but with Vera nattering on, I couldn't keep the numbers lined up in my head.

“But it started raining just before we left. They said it was supposed to rain all week, and we decided let's stay in the city. So five of us, we went to a club instead.”

“You don't have much luck with rain, do you?”

She gave me a wounded look. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing. What happened at the club?”

“My boyfriend at this time, Josef was his name, he was high. We were all high, but he was
really
out of his head. And he decided wouldn't it be funny to sell some of the pills? Let's pretend we are drug dealers! A joke, you know. A game. It was funny then, I can't say why.”

“Maybe because you were on drugs?”

“Could be,” she said. “So he sold ecstasy to some kid in the bathroom. And then the second person he tried to sell it to was a policeman. End of drug ring.” Vera finished her story with a one-note laugh. “God, Josef was an idiot.”

I don't know which numbers did it but the safe popped opened.
Absurd. A joke
. The same kind of language she'd used describing my brother's watch theft scheme, and yet she'd gone along with that, too. I didn't know if she was lying to me or just herself, or if she really was the perpetual passive victim-accomplice she came across as. I didn't care anymore. Everything in my wallet looked to be in order. All my dad's credit cards were there, along with two hundred dollars American and about two-thousand Czech crowns. I shoved all of it, passport, wallet,
Rudolf's Curiosities
exhibit booklet, and
Prague Unbound,
into the accordion folder now doubling as my suitcase.

I heard a dry click and spun to the sound. Vera held a lit cigarette in one hand and a gunmetal lighter in the other. She'd opened the window and was blowing smoke out into the night as the curtains flowed around her, her body entirely still, a statue of itself.

“Close that fucking window.”

My tone jolted her. My tone jolted me.

“I thought because of the smoke—”

“I've got a thing about open windows.”

“Alright, fine. Fine.
Ježíš Maria
.”

“This room is no smoking anyway.”

“So call your policeman. Have me arrested.”

“Five years later your tracks are all covered, huh?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know where you live, Vera. I saw your house. It's a nice house with a nice car in a nice garage. Nice big yard for kids to play in. That's an awful lot of nice for someone whose last job was as a part-time art gallery worker five years ago.”

“That's what this about? My house?”

“Will you please close the window?”

“You don't know what you think you know.”

“I'm an uncle. I know that.”

That stopped her. I stomped across the room, pain emanating in waves from my ankle, and I must have looked crazy because she recoiled as I neared, moving off to one side, eyes not leaving mine for a second. I slammed the window shut and did the latch. As I moved away, she buried her face in her hands and started shaking her head and mumbling something over and over in Czech. Or maybe it was Klingon.

“His name is Lee,” she finally said.

I turned around.

“My son. He's four years old and his name is Lee.”

“You've got to be fucking kidding me.”

“His middle name. His first name is Tomáš, after my grandfather. They call him Tomášek, or Tomík. Means like little Tomáš. But his middle name is for your father. Most Czech children don't have middle names, you know.”

No, I didn't know. Ever since I got here, people thought I knew what I didn't know.

“But Paul once said if he had a child he would name it Lee,” she continued. “And now Tomáš doesn't want to be called Tomáš
because already there are already two other Tomáš' in his class. So we call him Lee. I was six weeks pregnant when Paul died. He didn't know. He never knew.”

I couldn't muster a response. I went to the bathroom to grab my shaving kit and Vera trailed behind me. I realized I hadn't brought any shaving kit and bent over the sink and splashed water on my face. My wet face in the mirror a cruel caricature.