Complication (26 page)

“Why are you so angry?” said Vera.

“I'm not angry.”

“I'm the one who should be angry.”

“So be angry. I'm going home.”

“To America? It's nearly two in the morning. No planes will be leaving now. I don't even think the airport will be opened.”

“Of course it's open. It's an airport.”

“There's blood on your shirt.”

There was. And looking down, more than I would've thought.

“What happened?” Vera said. “What is going on?”

I pushed past her, went into the main room to grab my things. I glanced at the painting on wall,
The Unmerciful Geometry of Zugzwang 1938,
with the grumpy old pipe smoker and his arrogant young chess opponent and all the faceless patrons in the smoky café and all at once pictured myself in an airport security line. Unshaven, disheveled, and baggy-eyed, a cut by my right ear and a rip in my suit jacket. Dried blood on my collar and shirtsleeves. Pants torn. I fast-forwarded to the part where I had to remove my shoes—whoever's shoes—and the security guy sees I'm wearing no socks. Sees the soles of my feet covered in a suspiciously reddish substance. Notices I have no carry-on luggage, save for a dog-eared book embedded with glass, and a giant folio with a black hand scribbled on its side. I had a better chance of being crowned King of Wallachia than I had getting on an airplane.

But that didn't mean I was going to stick around and wait for
Soros to show up. And as long as Vera was with me, well, there was one less person out there plotting how to kill me or frame me for killing someone else.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,
the saying went. I envied its originator for being able to tell the difference.

“We're leaving,” I said.

“Leaving? To where?”

“I don't know. But we're not safe here.”

“I'm not going anywhere until you tell to me what is happening.”

“I'll tell you inside a cab.”

She weighed this for a long time. Hers wasn't what you'd call an expressive face, but it moved through a number of frustrated variations only to arrive right where it had started the very first time I'd seen her, when I'd spotted her across the room at the Black Rabbit, looking beautiful and exhausted and resigned to the notion that whatever happened next could be no worse than what had already occurred. She was gazing into something also gazing into her, and each was waiting for the other one to blink.

I
nstead of a cab we took Vera's car, a BMW model maybe eight years old that she'd parked in the three-car lot opposite the Hotel Dalibor. There was a child's safety seat in the back, and when she turned on the ignition, some high-pitched cartoon voice started singing in Czech to a John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt melody. Vera turned off the stereo and took out her phone as she maneuvered the car out of the lot.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“I'm calling to say I won't be back tonight.”

“Calling who?”

“You must relax.”

“Don't tell anyone where we're going.”

“Relax. I'll tell them what I tell them.”

“I'm relaxed. Where are we going anyway?”

“You said not to say.” A cutting smile. I didn't like it, but what was I going to do? I couldn't check into another hotel, not without using a credit card, which meant Soros and his former friends on the force or his newer friends in the Martinko Klingáč fan club would be able to track me down. I could've asked Vera to get a
room, but they knew her, too. As she spoke in hushed tones to what must have been an answering machine, I tried to think what I would've done in similar circumstances in Chicago. Go to that twenty-four-hour Korean restaurant on Lawrence? Just drive up and down Milwaukee Avenue all night until I ran out of gas? It was a moot point. I wasn't in Chicago, and I wasn't in charge of what happened next. Ever since I walked into the Black Rabbit, I really never had been.

One of the hard parts about being in a foreign country is losing your cultural signifiers. Back home, a woman talks a certain way, wears a certain kind of clothes, and you can more or less gauge the type of job she might have, her education level, who she votes for, what TV shows she probably likes. With Vera, I had no idea. What did it mean that she drove a BMW? What did it mean that she'd gone to Charles University, that she'd been busted trying to sell ecstasy in a club, that she smoked Marlboro Reds, or that she spoke English as well as she did? What did it mean that, as far as I could tell, she had no job? What did it mean that she lived in Ořechovka? She had money—that much seemed obvious—but was it old money, new money, earned money, stolen money? What did it mean she'd had a child with my brother out of wedlock? Was this frowned upon here, or was it commonplace, no big deal? If she was American, I could have sized her up and answered all these questions without even having to consciously think about it. And maybe my answers would have been wrong, based on stereotypes and assumptions, all those snap judgments you're not supposed to make by the book's cover, but at least it would've been a start.

She finished her call, speaking a few phrases in Czech that could have meant anything, and then hung up with a look of relief. Outside the window the fabric of the night lay densely woven over the tiny streets, the empty churches, the torpid river
and low stone bridges stitched across it. As Vera drove southward, the adrenaline left my body and my muscles lost their tension and I felt myself drifting.

Next thing I knew we were parked on a street canopied by trees growing on an adjacent grassy embankment. We were on the other side of the river now, the west side, perhaps only thirty yards from the water's edge.

“Wake up, wake up,” Vera monotoned.

She got out of the car and slammed the door. I followed her. We walked past a blazing Erotic World porn shop that was better lit than most of the films they sold, then stopped at a door around the corner. I watched Vera's pale hands as she flipped through her keys. Fingers so thin a paper cut might hit bone. She opened the door and we ascended a dingy stairwell, vanishing in the gloom and reemerging onto a carpeted third-story hallway. She was now several yards ahead of me, jostling another key inside another lock. I found myself studying the back of her neck, her spine like a string of pearls stretched taut under her skin.

Then I saw the man in a black suit at the far end of the hall advancing with halting strides. When he saw I'd noticed him he stopped walking. For several moments we stood motionless regarding each other, and I felt a rising panic as I blinked against the light, trying to focus on his face. The man blinked too, and all at once I realized I was staring into a mirror, one mounted in a frame at the hall's end, placed above a little table with a vase and a few fake flowers. Couldn't blame me for thinking the guy suspect. Just look at the miserable bastard.

Vera pulled me by the crook of my arm into the room and turned on the light. She took off her shoes and motioned me to do the same. I waited until she'd moved into the living room lest she look too closely at my bloodied feet. Something about removing the shoes made me shudder, but I was unable to translate the
sensation into actual thought. I stared at the shoes for awhile, but it didn't help. My neurons were misfiring from exhaustion.

The living room was sparsely furnished, a small TV in one corner, a beige sofa pushed up against a wall. There was a bookshelf whose lower reaches were filled with kids' stuff—coloring books, DVDs, and VHS tapes. Nearby sat red plastic storage containers jumbled with stuffed animals, trains, a Spider-Man action figure.

“
Vítáme vás
,” said Vera, spreading her arms mock grandiose before letting them fall to her sides. “Means welcome. Something to drink?”

“This is your place?”

“Yes, for now.”

“What about that place this afternoon?”

“That belongs to my parents. Tomáš and I go there for dinner every Friday night, and he often stays with them during the weekends.”

“I thought you called him Lee.”

“Tomáš, Tomášek, Lee.” An exasperated shrug. “You seem strangely interested in the house, so I'll tell you a story. My grandfather bought it in the late 1930s. He then owned Czechoslovakia's largest textile factory. But when the Communists came to power, they took the factory, kicked his family out of the house, made it state property. My mother was one year old then. Twenty-one years later she married my father, who was a member of the Party and would become the Minister of Agriculture. And guess what house was designated for the Minister of Agriculture? So my mother moved in again to her childhood home. But then in 1989, the Communists were kicked out and we lost the place again. So we moved around for two years before my mother could prove that she was the rightful, pre-Communist owner. Now she's lived in the same house three different times, under three different
regimes. Is there anything else about my living arrangements you'd like to know?”

I shook my head, and she turned and made her way into the kitchen. I don't know why I didn't consider that the place might have belonged to her parents, but then how could I have known? She was one of those people it was hard to imagine even having parents. That she evidently hadn't bought the mansion in Ořechovka with proceeds from the Rudolf Complication hardly meant she was above suspicion. Then again, there was no one else left to trust. Bob Hannah was dead. Soros was a black sheriff for Martinko Klingáč.

And trusting myself? Seemed like a clear conflict of interest.

On the other side of the room, a large window looked over the river and the bridge running across it. This must have been where Vera had sat watching tram after tram rattle by in the flood's early days, hoping against hope that Paul was in one of them. Be hard to continue living here with that kind of memory. Hard to live anywhere with a miniature version of Paul running around with his little Paul grin. Since my brother had died, there were days, not many but some, when I could forget about him completely, when nothing forced my memory into a place he occupied. But this couldn't have been true for Vera.

She returned with something clear in a glass with ice for herself and a beer for me. Alcohol was probably the last thing I needed, but I'd never needed a beer more in my life. She took me by the arm and led me into the living room, pushing one of Tomáš Lee Svobodova's storybooks to the floor in order to make room for us. We sat drinking on the couch. When she finally spoke, her voice was a measured hush.

“On your feet,” she began. “Is it blood?”

I looked at my bloodied feet, nodded.

“Is it your blood?”

I shook my head. “Someone else's.”

“Is this someone else . . . alive?”

I tossed up my hands and mumbled. Her eyes flitted away and she took another sip from her drink while she considered my feet and the origins of the substance upon them. “This is to do with Paul. And the man who killed him. Martinko Klingáč.”

I nodded.

“Did you kill him?”

I shook my head.

“Your feet must be cold.”

I said they were, a little.

She placed her glass on the coffee table, hand alighting for a moment on my knee as she rose and walked out of the room. On the table was some art magazine opened to a photograph of a large painting hanging on a white gallery wall. The painting depicted a man in a pea green military uniform sitting at a table upon which was placed a squarish case of some kind. It was a photorealistic painting, the details of the small, ugly room rendered with grimy accuracy, but where the uniformed man's head should be was only a diffuse smear of green. The painting was titled
The Interrogation
and was part of a controversial retrospective featuring artworks by inmates from mental hospitals throughout former Communist states. A pair of balled socks landed on the magazine. Men's socks, white. I thanked Vera and put them on. They were worn thin, and I wasn't about to ask whose feet had done the wearing. Vera slid onto the couch next to me, closer than before. She'd changed into a long gray T-shirt that hung loose on her frame, her contours beneath veiled save for the hard jutting line of her collarbone and the twin points of her nipples. Her legs were bare and coltish.

“Better, no?” she asked.

“My feet thank you.”

“You're a lot like him, you know. Like Paul. Not just how you look. The way you move. How you carry yourself. When you are angry, your face is like his face.”

I shrugged uneasily, not sure where she was going with this.

“Are you still going to leave tomorrow? To go back to Chicago?”

“I don't know. I think so.”

“You should go. You should not have come. The letter wasn't meant for you. Don't take it the wrong way. It's nothing against you. But I wrote the letter for Paul's father. I wouldn't have asked you. It's different for brothers.”

“What do you mean?”

“Brothers are always competing in everything. Like children fighting over toys. They always want what the other one has and it makes them do stupid things.”

“You think my brother and I were rivals?”

“You're too much alike not to be.”

“Is this based on something Paul told you?”

“He didn't have to tell me anything. Just like you don't have to tell me anything. I can see how you look at me.”

“How I look at you?”

“Don't be angry.”

“I'm not angry. You keep saying I'm angry.”

“I imagine this happens often with brothers all the time. What you are feeling is natural.”