Complication (27 page)

“Oh? And what am I feeling?”

“That you wish to sleep with me.”

I bit the inside of my lip and studied her dispassionate expression for any fissures while trying to assemble a response that didn't sound false or overly composed, one that matched her matter-of-fact delivery, as if we were merely two people discussing the train schedule. But when I spoke the words became decoupled before they'd even left the station. Deep down, I knew she was right. Not
just about wanting to sleep with her—most guys would—but about my brother, too. I was only stunned that it was so obvious to her.

“If tonight, if I gave you the impression—”

“Not only tonight. Always.”

“Whatever impression I gave, tonight or previously, I think maybe our signals got crossed. Which is to say I never intended to give you that sort of impression.”

She smiled. “I never said you intended it.”

“All I'm interested in right now is finding out who killed my brother.”

“Martinko Klingáč did. I told you already.”

“Yes, but why? How? Who is this person?”

She finished her drink. “Why does it matter?”

“Because he's my brother, Vera. Paul was murdered. You told me so yourself. This is the father of your child we're talking about. It matters.”

“Don't you dare bring my son into this.”

“Why write the letter, Vera? If you don't want to do anything. If you don't want anything done. If it doesn't matter. It makes no sense.”

“A moment of weakness,” she said. “Paul is not coming back. Nothing you learn, nothing you do, can make him alive again. And look at yourself. Running around in torn clothes and no socks. Blood on your shirt, on your feet. Carrying some folder you think has all the secrets. You're not bringing Paul back, but you know this. Because it's not really about him. It's about you.”

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“You're only angry because it's true. Can you even hear how you sound?”

“Like Paul? Is that what you're going to say?”

“Yes, like him.” She was talking faster now, and louder too,
her composure slipping by degrees. “I shouldn't have told you anything, but you're the one who failed. You broke your promise. You talked. Whatever happens now is because of you. Because of what you did. Not because of the letter I wrote.”

“Right. Has nothing to do with anything you did or didn't do five years ago. It all started with me, never mind that I've been here less than forty-eight hours.”

“Stop lying!”

“Lying about what? Just what have I ever lied to you about, Vera?”

She closed her eyes and held both hands out in front of her. “What always I say is there is no winning against a person like Martinko Klingáč. All that can happen is you will be hurt. Or you will be killed. Go home while you still can.”

“Always you said this? So you warned Paul about Martinko Klingáč?”

Stonefaced, she threw back some of her drink.

“Even though you didn't know who he was?” I pressed. “That's what you said earlier, right? That you had no idea who Martinko Klingáč was. That he was just some mysterious someone Paul met. Some guy with slick hair and a fairytale name who was afraid of bald people. So how, Vera, could you warn Paul if you didn't know anything about him? If you were so completely ignorant of all things Rumpelstiltskin?”

“I didn't know anything. I knew he was a gangster. Everybody knew this. You need sleep. I need sleep. This talking is absurd.”

“I need answers,” I said. “Nothing you tell me is making sense right now. Nothing you told me has ever made sense. You want to know what I think? I think you and this Martinko Klingáč knew each other before my brother ever set foot in this charming city of yours. I think you met Paul Holloway and said here's the fucking
dupe we've been looking for. Here delivered unto us is the big-eared, grinning American idiot of our prayers.”

She drew in her shoulders, recoiling and hardening. Whereas my words moments previously were stuttering and disjointed, now they issued forth in an unregulated torrent. I accused her of using Paul to steal the Rudolf Complication, intending all along to double-cross him once the heist was complete, to split the loot with Martinko Klingáč and leave Paul high and dry. And how was it that Soros the black sheriff just happened to be at the Black Rabbit the very night I came to visit? How was it the booklet for the
Rudolf's Curiosities
exhibit just happened to wind up in my hotel room? How did he just happen to be waiting outside her parents' house when I followed her from the café on Wenceslas Square? Too many events didn't add up, and she was a part of all of them, going all the way back to five years ago when my brother disappeared.

As I rambled on, she just sat there on the sofa, listening impassively, face betraying nothing. I don't even know if I believed half the things I said, but I knew they needed saying, and when I finally finished, she put her empty glass upon the coffee table, edging forward on the couch until her face was only a few inches from my own. Her voice was barely above a murmur when she spoke.

“Are you saying,” she began, “that you think I had a hand in killing him?”

“Bad word choice. But yes, I'm saying I can't rule it out.”

“You can't rule it out. The father of my child?”

“Don't bring your son into this.”

She glanced away, eyes moist and blinking. Then her arm wheeled back and she slapped me. Her aim was a little off and she missed my face, her open hand walloping me on the side
of the head, or maybe that's where she'd been aiming all along because she caught me just above my ear, where I'd been cut flying through Soros's windshield. But she wasn't done. She hit me again, same place and harder. I winced and jerked my head back. When next she swung there was blood on her hand and it was no longer opened but balled into a fist. I intercepted it in midswing, grabbing her forearm. She went for the glass on the table with her other hand and swung it in an arc at my head, but I ducked and she lost her grip and the glass plonked off the wall and then shattered on the floor. I let go of her wrist and planted the heel of my palm into her chest, shoving her down onto the couch. As she gasped I took up the accordion folder and started heading for the door.

Her voice was a whimper. “Paul, no.”

No sooner did I stop to wonder if I really heard what I thought I heard than she rose and launched off the coffee table. She landed on my back, one arm going around my neck as she grabbed fistfuls of my hair with the other. Her legs wrapped around my midsection and squeezed tight as I wheeled, trying to shake her. I lurched and stumbled, dropping the folder and watching its contents flutter and spill across the floor, then I felt a shard of glass slice into the flat of my foot. I went sideways and Vera came loose and clutched at the left sleeve of my shirt as she fell and the fabric tore with her weight as we toppled.

Then we hit the floor and she rolled away, still clutching my now severed shirtsleeve as she stopped to gaze up at me, nostrils flaring, eyes jumping from my face to the exposed flesh of my forearm and back again.

“My God,” she mouthed.

Then a moment of stillness before her lips starting trembling and her face began to twitch and she launched herself from the floor. She landed on top of me, knee going into my thigh, her
hands ripping at my exposed chest. The mass of her hair slid across her head and then fell off altogether to reveal the unstubbled skull beneath, the skin of it beaded with sweat and almost translucent blue. Her baldness came as such a shock I stared a moment before I knocked her hands away and rolled free and she latched onto my waistband as I struggled to my feet and then my pants were halfway down my thighs and I was on my back again. She was upon me, flush with tears and howling and clawing. I grabbed her wrists and forced them to her sides and she writhed and kicked and pressed her face hot and sobbing into my neck.

My head was turned, eyes fixed on the wig lying a few feet away in a heap like some lifeless animal.

I held her still and her sobs relented but her tears never stopped coming and after a time she unburied her face and found my mouth with her own and pressed the entirety of her body flat against mine. Moments later she wrested one hand free of my grip and reached into the slit of my boxer shorts as my hands moved under shirt, fingers lacing the notches of her spine while she pulled aside her underwear to expose the full heat of herself and in a single movement bore down upon me until I was inside her.

Was-Kelley marvels not at the sooty black immensity of the New Tower Gate nor the transgressor's skulls rising gapemouthed upon pikes around its perimeter as he and the caravan of dead gypsies are ushered through the most formidable of Prague's thirteen points of entry. Without cloaking intercession from Madimi, this gruesome coach pulled by a skeletal nag would never have made it past the sentries, even at this predawn hour. Without intercession from Madimi, there would be no Was-Kelley, only a pile of bones at the bottom of an unconsecrated, lime-dusted pit. Without Madimi, there would be no Rudolf Complication that he has come to repossess.

The caravan halts, and Was-Kelley nods to the three withered dead women who have escorted him to the city, but they only gaze back eyeless and slackjawed as he hobbles out of the coach. He reaches out to pat the horse, but the nag lurches to avoid his touch and drags the caravan away. Later the coach and its rotting freight will by terrified Prague dwellers be discovered in the Old Town Square, the vessel arriving like the wooden horse of Troy to spread death and disease among them. The horse will be slaughtered and burned outside the city gates.

By sunrise the malformed streets are already alive with the cries of merchants, the bleating of sheep, the clatter of hooves upon the cobblestones. With half-closed eyes, Was-Kelley knows himself in Prague by its smell alone, one of acrid smoke and reeking offal as he limps to the edge of the street where a gathering of urchins stand in loose congregation about a fallen calf. They squeal and
kick the dead animal in the mouth and tumble over each other to snatch up its bloodied teeth as if some soothsayer has declared these items fortuitous. Was-Kelley looks beyond the dogpiled urchins to the Rathaus adorned with Master Hanuš's horologe, to the Týn Church whose dark spires tower over the square like a congregation of magicians. They inspire no memories in him. The Hradschin Castle complex looms on the hill beyond the river, but he turns his face to the rising east, to a sun whose warmth is now powerless against the chill in his bones. The world entire angles askew as he staggers with lopsided and shambling gait. Dogs whimper or snarl as he passes, cats scurry at the mere sight of his shadow. Mothers look upon him with apprehension and pull their children from the path of this mad and earless cripple, this pale Lazarus crazed by daylight as he hobbles toward the House of the Black Rabbit where he knows Madimi will be waiting. Madimi will guide him to the Rudolf Complication. After that it will be up to Was-Kelley to put the cursed watch in motion.

 

 

Was-Kelley has no memory of creating the Rudolf Complication, cannot summon all those nights after the bemused King had freed him that he had spent alone in his meager study at a table edged up near the window where, lacking shewstone, he would fill a shallow silver bowl with water and wait for moonlight to pool upon its surface. Madimi would appear and for hours dictate how the Complication must be fashioned. Soon the mirror and the moonlight were no longer necessary, and she would reach him through paintings, through street signs or graffito scrawled upon walls. Most often she came to him through books. Kelley could open any volume upon his shelf and find her words written therein, for she was then so much with him she could no longer be said purely a spiritual entity and yet neither was she corporeal.
Was-Kelley can no longer remember how when among the living he would for days and weeks on end sit entranced by Madimi's words, one hand feverishly filling books with notes and diagrams, the other idly picking splinters from his wooden leg.

Trusting none to keep secret the apparatus of his devising, when its design was complete, Kelley commissioned three separate watchmakers—one to create the forward mechanism, a second the backwards, a third to construct the watch housing with the engraved ouroboros and heraldic lion. This third artisan also produced the winding key with Enochian symbols Madimi revealed during skrying sessions long ago with Dr. Dee. Kelley lacked the curiosity to inquire as to the meaning of these symbols, an oversight he would in time, and indeed throughout time, profoundly regret. Knowing the Emperor to be enthralled with the Cabbala and all things Hebrew, Kelley sought the assistance of the esteemed Rabbi Löew. Löew, a wise man of high estate, would have nothing to do with the known charlatan and necromancer. But Jacob Eliezer, an Italian known as the Black Rabbi, would. He conveyed during secret meetings at the Black Rabbit how the Cabbalistic sciences might be purposed to prolong the ticking of the watch far beyond its natural mechanical limitations.

Nearly three years after his release from Křivoklát Castle, exhausted and penniless and earless and half legless, Edward Kelley at last completed the Rudolf Complication. On the eve before he was to deliver the watch, in his study Kelly conducted one last test to vouchsafe the instrument's mechanisms. To his horror, when he placed the key in the winding slot, he discovered that it would not budge in any direction. A watch that could not be wound would not tick. A watch that would not tick would surely anger His Sovereign, move him to imprison and torture Kelley once again if not have him drawn and quartered. As Kelley in panicked vision imagined his body being fastened by
ropes and torn asunder by charging steeds, he fell bodily upon the floor. Only then sweating and gnashing his teeth did he notice the black scrawled graffito on the ceiling above, the vehicle by which Madimi had chosen to reveal the Three Laws governing the Rudolf Complication: