Complication (5 page)

 

[Silence—duration 2 seconds]

 

AGENT #3553: Her name was
.She had her skull fractured in four different places from blows delivered by a blunt instrument, and the body was in fact found at none of those locations.

 

[Silence—duration 9 seconds]

 

REZNÍCKOVÁ: You would know better than me.

 

AGENT #3553: Perhaps not.

 

[TAPE ENDS]

A
round 8 AM I woke disoriented and enclosed by pale yellow walls empty save for a grim painting featuring two bearded men playing chess in a smoke-filled tavern. You could tell which one was losing by the way he clutched his meerschaum pipe hard between his teeth, his face rigid with concentration, while his younger opponent was casually wiping his glasses on his coat sleeve. All other figures in the painting were subsumed in the shadows, their conversations, I imagined, muted by the blanket of hovering smoke.

My hotel was one of few in Karlín, a neighborhood just north of the city center, the hotel itself only blocks from where my brother's blood-stained shirt and expired work permit were found in the courtyard of a building on Křižíkova Street. A five-story Neo-Renaissance building with a salmon pink façade going gray from its proximity to a highway overpass one hundred yards from my third-story window, the hotel looked out over a small grassy lot, a McDonald's, a tram stop. On the other side of the street, the world's saddest looking shoe store stood next to a seedy
establishment with mirrored windows and a neon sign reading “non-stop herna bar.”

Heading home from the Black Rabbit last night, I'd been accosted on the street by a little girl no older than eight who trailed me from the subway station. Following close at my heels, she kept repeating some phrase over and over and trying to hand me a used, pocket-sized tourist guidebook called
Prague Unbound
. It looked to be in good condition, its cover even improbably embossed with faded gold lettering and bound in black leather, but I didn't plan on doing any sightseeing. The little girl was devilishly persistent, though. When I finally gave up and handed her a couple crowns, she loosed a grin that gave me shudders. The poor kid had diseased blackened gums and not a single tooth in her mouth.

Prague Unbound
had yellowing pages and that singular musty old book smell as I cracked it open and set about finding out what herna bars were. Turned out they were low stakes gambling establishments and not, as I would have guessed, high-energy protein snacks. Oddly enough, the photograph in the book was of the very same herna bar across my hotel and was taken from nearly the same perspective I had looking out the window. In the distance beyond lurked the massive Žižkov TV Tower, rising on a hilltop like a malformed rocket awaiting takeoff. The guidebook said it was the tallest structure in the city, built by the Soviets allegedly to jam Western radio and television broadcasts. After the Russians left, a local artist had decorated it with sculptures of faceless black babies crawling ant-like up its surface.

Prague Unbound
also mentioned that the area was the site of a bloody battle between the Holy Cross Army and the Hussites in 1420 which saw hundreds of the retreating Crusaders drown in the Vltava as they made a panicked attempt to flee, the book noting, “in layers of mud and silt the river records bone-by-bone the measure of human folly.” The book didn't have much to say
about anything else in my vicinity, except for mentioning a nearby museum that housed a huge 3D model of the city handmade entirely from paper and built by a lone man in the eighteenth century over the course of eleven years before he died broken and penniless. “Prague has a genius for inspiring grand ambitions in its most ardent suitors,” the guidebook warned in sidebar, “and a history of rewarding such devoted efforts with complete and utter ruination. As perhaps its most famous writer put it, this little mother has claws.”

My ambitions for the morning were anything but grand. I had nothing to do all day until my meeting with Vera and no interest in pretending to be a tourist. Maybe I resisted experiencing Prague because in some irrational, abstract sense, I blamed the little mother with claws for Paul's death. Even when he was alive, I'd never gotten used to the idea of him being in Europe. Paul was no liberal arts grad putting off penning the Great American Screenplay, no wild oats sowing trust-fund bohemian with a café-ready copy of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, no high-risk entrepreneur looking to score in the Wild, Wild East. You'd never mistake him for a member of the intelligence or diplomatic communities, neither intelligence nor diplomacy being among his noted qualities. Paul was
smart in his own way
, I had been fond of saying. You might think it was like saying a fat girl had a pretty face, but that's not exactly what I meant. Paul certainly knew things I didn't. He understood the intricacies of wagering at off-track betting parlors, could find a good twenty-four-hour diner in any part of the city, knew how to talk shop to bookies and low-level drug dealers and policemen. He knew how much a transmission rebuild should cost before you're getting ripped off, the medical risks associated with ultraviolet tattoo inks, the difference between regular and goofy foot, and which pawn shops were open on Christmas Eve.

I don't know how his kind of smarts served him in Central Europe, but it hardly mattered. Paul had gone to Prague for love, to hear him tell it, though he would've sooner worn a Cubs jersey at Comiskey than used the word love earnestly when speaking of a woman in the company of men. While hanging out with some buddies at a bar on Cermak, he'd run into a girl named Sarka, a Czech who worked as an au pair for a couple in the Gold Coast during the day and tended bar at night. They started hanging out together. Then she had some kind of visa trouble and had to go back to the Czech Republic, re-apply for a work permit. They'd only been seeing each other for three or four months by this time, but she'd invited him to come stay with her in Prague and wait out the slow churn of bureaucracy. When my brother told me about it, I figured that would be the last I'd hear of Sarka. A week later he called me and said he was leaving.

I'd asked if he knew anything at all about the Czech Republic. Its history, its language, food, culture, climate. Could he even name a famous Czech person? Could I? he'd countered. Franz Kafka, I said. Miloš Forman, Martina Navratilova, Václav Havel, Nadia Comaneci (that one was a trap—I knew she was Romanian). Also the model who married that guy from the Cars. Paul laughed, said I'd just made up those names. And even if I hadn't, how famous could these people be if he'd never heard of them? Then he rattled a bunch of Czech names I didn't recognize. All were hockey players or porn stars. And Paulina Porizkova, he said, was the name of the woman once married to that lucky bastard from the Cars.

Nadia Comaneci, he added, was Bulgarian.

I took a shower. Clean tub, good water pressure. Housekeeping knocked, housekeeping entered, I kept showering. Once they'd gone I toweled off and got dressed. My suit reeked of cigarettes
from the Black Rabbit, but I had nothing else to wear. As I was putting on my father's shoes, I noticed a large manila envelope sitting atop the writing desk in the corner. My name (or Dad's name) was written upon it in block letters. I walked over and ripped it open. Inside was a small booklet.

Even with the date and
Čertovka
and
Malá Strana
printed on the front, only when I started flipping through the pages and landed on a description of the watch itself did I understand what I was looking at.

Ghosted under the text were twin illustrations of the watch, one with the case closed, one opened. Closed, a stylized heraldic engraving of a lion stood out from the watch's gold cover. Inside, black roman numerals circled the yellowed ivory face, and there was a single tapered hand to indicate the hour, no minute hand, nothing for ticking off seconds. A portrait of Emperor Rudolf wearing the piece was featured in the brochure. Jowly, bulbous nosed, heavy-lidded, and long of chin—considering the artist surely flattered the royal subject, Rudolf must've looked like the Richard Nixon of his day. The watch was shaped like a tambourine and not much smaller than one, less like a watch you'd wear on your wrist than one of those clocks East Coast hip-hop clowns draped around their necks in the eighties.

How much was it worth?

Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

Paul did think big. Had to give him that.

Never clearly, rarely deeply, but often big.

Smart in his own way.

Beneath Rudolf's glum stare, on the corner of the page, someone had penned a message in black ink still so fresh it glistened under the morning light streaming in through the hotel window.

Astronomical Clock, Old Town Square, 9 am
.

Vera had evidently bribed one of the maids or another hotel employee to bring this to my room. She'd bumped up our meeting and changed the location, a shrewd maneuver as there would now
be no time for me to get wired with a listening device or arrange for an undercover cop to tail me to our meeting, a notion that had occurred to me and been instantly rejected as ridiculous even as I tossed and turned with jetlag at 4 AM.

I looked up the Astronomical Clock in
Prague Unbound
. It was a big tourist attraction, one of the most famous clocks in Europe. “Legends abound regarding this celebrated horloge,” said the guidebook. “Tales of conspiracy and mayhem and eye-gouging. Pay them no more heed than you would a drunken Turk.” I read the sentence twice, but it came out the same both times. Guess the cultural sensitivity movement hadn't reached Czech tourist literature yet.

I wondered if Vera was being ironic in selecting a famous old clock as our new meeting place as I tore the cover page from the booklet in case I needed the address later, folded it inside
Prague Unbound,
and slipped the guidebook in my jacket pocket. The two figures hunched over their chess game in the painting were still pondering their next moves as I headed out.