Complication (8 page)

Was Vera watching? It wouldn't look good, me talking to some random someone. But I couldn't resist asking, “How can you tell he's a pickpocket?”

“Once I arrest him. Tram 9. And his girlfriend. She's still in jail now. ”

It was a lot easier to imagine the speaker getting arrested than doing any arresting. He was maybe five seven, on the thin side except for a second-trimester paunch. With the ruddy face of a drinker, and a mess of salt and pepper hair, it was easy to overlook the bleary intensity of his eyes. I realized suddenly I'd seen him before. It was the man from inside the Black Rabbit. The one who'd been watching me speak with Vera.

“You are waiting for someone?” He snorted and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “You seem maybe nervous. Are you nervous, Mr. Holloway?”

“How do you know my name?”

He tapped a finger against the whitewall of his temple then turned and loped toward the massive Jan Hus sculpture at the
center of the square, hunch-shouldered and half-limping through a flock of pigeons rising startled to flight. A beaming young woman stepped up and handed me a flyer for a performance of Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
being held in some church. I scanned once more for Vera. Pigeons beat their wings in gray swirl. Another girl tried to hand me a flier for a puppet show.

By the time I caught up with the man, he'd already crossed the square, moving past Jan Hus and through the serrated shadows beneath the Týn Church onto a sharply veering street marked Dlouhá. “Who are you?” I asked. “Did Vera send you?”

“My name is Soros. Long time I am waiting for you, man. Long time.”

He pivoted down another winding lane with the agitation of a man pacing a prison cell. I was trying to note the streets on the red nameplates fastened to the walls, but it was hard to tell where one ended and another began. No alleyways or even gaps, only walls meeting walls, as if in a maze or a dream.

Then I understood there was no need to worry about making my way back to Old Town Square. Vera wouldn't be coming. She wasn't the one who'd arranged to have the Rudolf II exhibit booklet in my room with
9 am Astrological Clock
penned in the margin. No, that would be the man charging ahead of me, pushing through the crowd like someone about to be sick.

“Did you know my brother?” I called after him.

“Brother?” He stopped walking, and I watched his face drop as the realization hit. “You're not Paul Holloway? Well, fuck on me. You're not who I was waiting for. But then always I think he is dead anyway.”

“You knew him?”

“Yes. But when I know him already he is gone.”

“What does that mean?”

“He is my case for two days. When I am Detective Soros. Before I am just Soros.”

“You were a cop?”

“No, milkmaid,” he deadpanned. “Babies they drink my hairy tits. Yes, I am police. When Paul Holloway is missing, I am chief investigator. Two days on his case. Third day, everything fucks out bad. Different case I am stucked in my leg. Fifteen years old
pervitin
junkie in Holešovice, he stucks me with dirty fucking screwdriver also he stucks in his sister's
cikanka
asshole or I don't know what. My leg, it's poof! Like balloon. Red black blue. So, hospital. And when I get out, case of Paul Holloway is closed. Missing, they think dead. No body, no investigation. Nobody else looks for this man. No friends, no family here. Nobody we talk to, nobody is suspect. No case, my bosses say. And what are bosses but bosses? But I don't forget about Holloway. Not him, not the others.”

“What others?”

“Like your brother.”

The crowds were thinning, shop signs going from English to Czech, buildings losing their color, streets going cold in the morning shadows. Every passage looked like an echo of the one before, intersections a disharmony of wrong angles that reminded me of a Just Say No poster I'd seen in junior high featuring webs spun by spiders that were administered LSD. I remembered wondering what genius scientist decided to give spiders acid. I still kind of wondered, but it had been pushed down the list of life's unanswered questions.

“Are you saying there was some kind of cover-up?”

“After the flood, some parts of the city, they are destroyed. We're for many hours working, for many days no sleep. Move families from bad flood places, drag old women out of houses. Put down bags of sand, put up steel fences, go around the streets in
little boats. Smíchov, Malá Strana, Karlín—these places are turn to lakes. Old buildings, some are destroyed, collapse. Your brother is reporting missing. Anonymous call. In the area of Karlín, his clothing, it is found in the courtyard of a fallen apartment house. So they say maybe drowning, an accident. Missing, presumed dead. Is there suspicion? I think yes, but bosses think no. The body taken by the water, say bosses. Accidents don't need men to investigate. Accidents don't need evidence, paperwork. No suspects, questions, courtrooms. And the police, everyone in Prague, we are tired like fucking dogs then. Your brother is a victim of the flood, yes, but the flood doesn't kill him.”

“What makes you think not?”

“Because of where was the blood. On his shirt. On his right sleeve. Also because the time he disappears.”

“I don't follow.”

“Who are you speaking with last night?”

“I don't know her name,” I said.

“You say the name Vera. Already just now.”

“I don't know her last name.”

A shadow of anger flashed over his features before vanishing in the next instant. “I say your brother is murdered. You have no surprise. Why? Because already you know. Because I think the woman tells you. But who can know Paul Holloway is murdered? The person who kills him. Maybe a person who helps. Who are you speaking with last night?”

“None of the above?”

“Dog shit!” He seized my arm and yanked me violently sideways. I struggled to regain my balance and wrest myself from his grip, but it was no use. He could've punched me in the face or thrown me up against the wall or lead me in a foxtrot, but instead he just froze and pointed at a mess on the pavement. “Dog shit,” he repeated, relinquishing his hold with an uneven grin. “You
don't know the woman's last name? Then I tell you. Her name is Vera Svobodova.”

We passed a trio of old men sipping from paper bags on a bench outside a low gothic church, its doors yawning open to reveal an opaque darkness inside. Across the street, drying laundry and faded rugs hung from the balconies, and somewhere inside a television was blaring. Funny, no matter what country you're in, television always sounds like television. Soros resumed speaking while his shoes slapped a disjointed rhythm on the cobblestones.

“In Paul Holloway's shirt are two things. Expired work permit and matchbook from the Black Rabbit. I go there, show picture on the work permit. A barman says yes, I have seen this man. This man he has been there with a woman. Tall woman, black hair. Small tits, pity, otherwise a hot bitch looker, he says. I give this man my mobile number, tell him to call me if again he sees her. Five years happen. I leave the police, but still I have same phone. One day the woman appears again in the bar. Two nights, three nights. The barman, he remembers her. Men, they remember a hot bitch looker, tits or no tits. Again and again she visits the Black Rabbit, every night for two weeks maybe. Always she is alone. The barman calls Soros. I go to the Black Rabbit. For a week. I go and I watch. Every day is there Vera Svobodova. Then one day she is not alone. At her table is a man. Paul Holloway. Only next day I find out he's not Paul Holloway but Paul Holloway's brother. Fuck on me. But he knows Paul Holloway is murdered. And he doesn't want to be my friend.”

His story prompted so many questions my head was spinning. Probably didn't help I hadn't eaten since the airplane. The nameplate mounted on the building said we were on Bartolomějská Street, a pinched lane with the air of a film set after shooting had ended and everyone had gone home. I wondered where the hell Soros could be taking me, but moments later, we were once again
in tourist central. Crowds thickened, graffiti vanished, shop signs went from Czech to English, buildings from stony gray to pastels. We were in front of the clock, right where we'd started.

“The person who kills Paul Holloway is still alive,” Soros said. “Still here, in this city. This person will kill again. It will happen just like every year. Maybe this is too much for you now. Maybe you need time to understand. But there is no time.”

He dug into his pants pocket, came up empty, then reached into an inner pocket of his green warm-up jacket to produce a crumpled business card. “You don't believe me, maybe you will believe Bob Hannah. Tell Bob Hannah the detective sent you. Ask of your brother's right hand. Next time, maybe you will want to be friends.”

“His right hand?”

“Ask Bob Hannah.”

He hobbled off across the square, a bedraggled figure bobbing and weaving through the crowds until a carriage pulled by a horse with red velvet blinders eclipsed my view and he was gone. Twenty feet away, a policeman in riot gear stood carrying a semi-automatic submachine gun. The German shepherd at his side lowered on its haunches, yawning and unfurling a pink gray tongue as a girl in a sandwich board advertising BE SOMEONE ELSE—PHOTOS IN HISTORIC OUTFITS walked by. I stood unmoving at the edge of Old Town square, studying the card.

I slipped the card into my pocket, pulled out
Prague Unbound
, and flipped to the map at the back in order to figure out the quickest route back to the hotel. Just left of the meandering Vltava River, in Old Town Square, northeast of Jan Hus and friends, beneath the Astronomical Clock, was a tiny dot. Beneath the dot, a handwritten scrawl reading,
Here you are again
.

M
y dad's shoes were half a size too large, and I could feel my feet blistering as I slumped down on a bench at the edge of the river. On the other side of the Vltava, a giant metronome sat on a high plateau, unmoving atop a concrete pedestal. Praguers were evidently nuts about all things timekeeping. Clocks in the metro stations, clocks on streetlamps, the Astronomical Clock with its creaky wooden effigies. But then, if my brother had died in a plot to steal a Maltese Falcon, I'd probably be noticing birds everywhere.
Prague Unbound
mentioned that the plinth where the metronome now stood was once the site of the largest sculpture in the world, one depicting Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Liberator of Nations, Gardener of Human Happiness, better known as Josef Stalin. The sculptor responsible for its creation suicided before the statue was unveiled, while the model drank himself to death because his friends turned on him and refused to call him anything but Stalin. The statue stood for only six years. When the Soviet leader's crimes were brought to light, Czechoslovakian authorities were further embarrassed because they couldn't figure out how to dismantle the 17,000-ton eyesore and had to
call in West German demolition experts. “Remnants of Stalin's exploded head may still be found in the stygian depths of the Vltava River below,” noted the book, “a reminder that men great and small may come and go but the Vltava is forever.”

I sat pondering my encounter with the ex-detective. What he'd told me was troubling enough—willful police indifference, a killer of some sort on the loose, something having to do with my brother's right hand—but what he didn't say was equally puzzling. He hadn't mentioned anything about the Rudolf Complication and didn't seem to know much about Vera beyond her name, the fact that she'd once been seen with my brother at the Black Rabbit, and that five years later she'd decided to start frequenting the place again. Could he be ignorant of the fact that my brother was part of a conspiracy to steal the watch? Maybe—but then why would he have arranged the exhibit booklet to be left in my room?

Maybe he was the third man. Martinko Klingáč.

Didn't seem likely. Nothing slick about wild hair, his wrestling-match-inside-a-Salvation-Army-drop-box outfit.

I'd also been thinking about the map in
Prague Unbound
, the one strangely marked with my exact location when I'd opened the book in Old Town Square, and decided this at least presented less of a mystery. It was a used book, after all—obviously its previous owners had drawn the dot and hand written
Here you are
in tiny script when trying to get their bearings. The Astronomical Clock was one of the biggest tourist draws in the city, after all, along with the Charles Bridge, one of two places probably everyone who came to Prague visited. This person, I guess, came twice, and either a frustrated or humorous impulse caused them to add
again
. Whatever the case, the coincidence wasn't that striking, and I had bigger things to worry about.

Somewhere church bells started ringing, and the sight of an old guy in a canoe fishing near one of the tiny islands in the river
got me thinking back to a trip to Wisconsin the three Holloway men had taken the summer my mom left—a memory I hadn't dusted off in years. I was thirteen, which would've made Paul nine or ten. It was a weekend thing where we stayed at a lakeside cabin owned by one of my dad's friends. Rained the whole first day, and we were stuck in a cramped cabin with no TV, no video games. Instead of grilling hamburgers, my dad had tried cooking them on an old potbellied stove and turned them into hockey pucks. By Sunday the three of us were sick of each other and began retreating into the silences of our separate worlds. But when the rain cleared we made a go of it anyway and headed out in a rowboat with rented gear. None of us knew what the hell we were doing, though my Dad talked a good game, having spent the previous afternoon reading
A River Runs Through It.
He insisted we not call them fishing “poles” but “rods” and talked about a four count rhythm and keeping our casts between ten and two o'clock, never mind that we were using lures rather than flies. No bites all afternoon, although we nipped at each other plenty, bickering about lures, the best spots in the lake to fish, whose fault it was we had forgotten to bring the cooler.