Complication (9 page)

Then out of nowhere Paul had a hit, rod jumping as if touched by something electric. He started reeling the fish in too fast, and the thing leapt out of the water trying to spit the hook. Biggest fish I'd ever seen, a bass, its enormous black spine breaking the surface of the lake as Paul cranked on the reel, his rod bowing like a curled, twitching finger. I remember the look of terrified concentration on his face as the thing thrashed and twisted. We didn't even know enough to put a net under it, my dad and I just standing there in our bulky orange life jackets giving him useless advice,
reel him in, pull, you got the sonofabitch
. Paul somehow hoisted the fish into the boat without ripping the hook out of its mouth. The fish flopped around, dull thuds sounding as it
smacked its tail against the floor of the boat. Then Paul dropped his fishing pole and grabbed the bass in both hands and it stopped fighting as he raised it aloft, its only movement the gills opening and closing like a slow bellows, and for one victorious moment, all the tension that had built up the whole weekend vanished.

Then the fish jerked to sudden life. In one spasm it twisted free of Paul's hands. Its midsection hit the edge of the boat as it plummeted, and the next moment was like watching a free throw bouncing on the rim, the ball trying to decide which way to go. The fish just as easily could've landed in the boat. But it went the other way, slipping into the water almost without a sound, disappearing into the depths of the lake. It raced away and took the rented fishing pole with it as Paul stared at his empty hands.

We got stuck in traffic on the way back into Chicago and spent four hours in the car listening to talk radio and staring out different windows, nobody speaking a word. Years later it became one of those stories we'd laugh about, part of family lore. Remember when Paul dropped that fish and it made off with his pole? Paul would smile as my dad told the story, shake his head. Tragedy plus time equals comedy. But I could tell Paul didn't really like remembering it. There wasn't much of that summer any of us wanted to remember.

And here I was remembering it anyway.

I took out the card Soros had given me, the one belonging to journalist Bob Hannah. After a few moments, I gave in and I dialed. If nothing else, it gave me an excuse to see if my localized cell phone SIM card actually worked. A few rings and then a beep sounded. No human on the other end, no voicemail greeting, just a long tone and silence. I left brief message along with my number and hung up.

I looked up the Gallery Čertovka in
Prague Unbound
.

The place was just across the river.

I was up and moving before I could talk myself down.

After wading through tourists for the next ten minutes, I found myself in front of a large waterwheel sitting motionless in the canal, black wood cracked and corroded. Vera's famous postcard waterwheel. Above it sightseers cattled endlessly across the Charles Bridge, only a few veering from the castle route in order to take in what my guidebook called Prague's Little Venice. Little was an understatement, as its only waterway was a walled ditch maybe half a mile long that separated Malá Strana from a small outcropping in the river called Kampa Island. Houses capped with red tiled roofs backed up to the water's edge on either side, sleepy little storybook dwellings painted the colors of Easter eggs.
Prague Unbound
went out of its way to warn that at night, the area was frequented by the ghost of a cuckolded locksmith with a rusty nail driven through his skull, condemned to wander the streets in search of some soul brave enough to remove the spike and release him from his torment.

I didn't run into any ghostly locksmiths, but halfway down the sloping U Lužického Semináře Street on the Malá Strana side of the canal, I found the gallery and went inside
.
The display room was roughly the size of a racquetball court only with much lower ceilings. A series of photographs was mounted on the walls. There were a couple racks of art books, and a postcard carousel sat near a front desk manned only by a box with a recommended gallery donation sign. I tried picturing Vera behind this desk. The top of her head would nearly have brushed the ceiling.

I dropped some coins into the collection box and wandered the floor, pretending to take in the photographs. The first picture featured a young man standing in front of a tank, his leather coat held defiantly open, as a soldier perched atop the tank's turret half-heartedly aimed a machine gun at his chest. Another showed a gaunt old man dejectedly facing the camera, eyes sunk in heavy
shadows, while behind him people sifted through broken furniture beneath a ruined façade of unglassed windows and walls mottled with bullet holes.

“Good morning,” called a man emerging from a staircase at the back of the room. He was somewhere in his sixties, had an oblong face framed by iron gray hair pulled into a ponytail, and was dressed in a brown sweater, loose corduroys, and Lennon spectacles. He looked like an old hippie who'd aged into uneasy respectability through no apparent fault of his own.

“Josef Koudelka,” he said, assuming a spot beside me.

“Nice to meet you, Josef.”

“Ah, no,” he chuckled. “My name is Gustav. Josef Koudelka is the man whose work you're admiring. Famous Czech photographer. Our show features his work from 1965–1970, before he was forced to emigrate.” The man's impeccable English was delivered accent free with a genial, avuncular air that reminded me of one of those professors in the movies, the kind who smokes pipes and quotes Shakespeare and helps inner city kids rise above their bleak circumstances through slam poetry or whatever. Even in my still mostly unwrinkled and expensive suit, curator Gustav had instantly sized me up as an English-speaking tourist with no clue what he was looking at.

None of which boded well for my plan.

“This is probably his most famous,” Gustav said, directing my attention to another picture. In the photo, the cameraman's arm jutted into frame, elbow cocked, wrist turned to show his watch. A first person POV of someone checking the time, nothing out of the ordinary until you noticed the watch said noon, and the broad city avenue spread below was eerily unpeopled.

“August 21, 1968,” the man resumed. “Wenceslas Square just before the Soviets literally entered the picture. They'd taken over the airport in the middle of the night, shut down the borders,
moved 7,000 tanks and half a million troops into our country. Not so much soldiers as kids really, ruddy cheeked, blue-eyed farm boys with guns and oversized uniforms and no idea where they were or why. We tried disorienting them even more by tearing down all the street signs in the city, rendering their maps unusable. They'd get lost, run out of gas, sit there sweating in the heat and begging for water. Lots of people here spoke Russian then, had to learn it in school, but you'd never have known it if you were a Russian T-55 tank commander. I'll never forget those tanks. Massive, gray, loud as hell. Like antediluvian monsters assembled from scrap metal.”

Antediluvian? This was going to be worse than I thought.

“You speak English well,” I said.

“I lived in Canada for twenty-three years. Toronto.”

“Never been to Canada. Been to Mexico.”

“I've heard parts of Mexico are quite pleasant.”

“I've only been to Tijuana.”

He held a neutral smile in place. In the photo it was still noon, still no one on the street. Looking at the disembodied arm against the motionless backdrop, all I could think about was what Soros had said just before we parted.
Ask what happened to your brother's right hand
.

“Well,” Gustav concluded, “enjoy the exhibit. Let me know if you have any questions.”

It was now or never. “Actually, I do.”

I passed him the card Soros had given me. “My name is Bob Hannah,” I said. “I work for
The Stone Folio
. Prague's leading English language weekly. We're working on a story about the flood and I was hoping to ask you a few questions.”

“About the flood?”

“Right. The one five years ago.”

“You must have very liberal deadlines.”

“We're a very liberal paper.” When that landed with a thud, I continued, “Actually, our story is more like a five years follow-up piece. A revisitation. Where are they now, human spirit triumphing over adversity, time heals all wounds, water under the bridge. We're considering that, title wise.
Water Under the Bridge
.”

Discs of light reflected off the lenses of his glasses, obscuring his eyes beneath as he inspected the card before tucking it the front pocket of his jacket. “I suppose you'll want to see the window?” he asked.

I had no idea what he meant but nodded anyway. He moved toward the same door he'd emerged from earlier, and I followed. On the way we passed another Koudelka picture, this one not of the Soviet invasion but a creepy shot of a masked figure clad in a black robe and flying through the night sky. The placard said it was taken to promote a play.

“Mluvíte česky?” said the curator over his shoulder.

“I'm sorry?”

“I asked if you spoke Czech. I have reams of printed matter about the Rudolf Complication, but most of it is in Czech. The Complication is really what you're interested in, right? The break-in, the big heist. How much do you know about the exhibit?”

“Only what was in the brochure.”

“Some background then.” He took off his Lennon specs and wiped them with his jacket sleeve. “The watch, as you know, was the main attraction. The only other object of any real interest was a certain chalice made from a unicorn's horn. Rudolf used it on the advice of his court physician, an Italian who thought it had great healing powers. Of course, being enlightened, modern people, we now know unicorns don't exist, and that their horns hold no magical properties. The chalice was actually fashioned from a narwhal tusk. We had some artwork as well. And a handful of his majesty's bezoars and a few alrauns. You're familiar with them?”

“I've seen some of their early work.”

He gave me a cockeyed look and replaced his glasses. “Bezoars are gallstones. Mass accretions in the gastrointestinal system.”

“Right. Accretions. Misheard you.”

Like I was supposed to know what bezoars were. I was already starting to dislike being Bob Hannah. I curled my lips between my teeth and pocketed my hands. I couldn't let this encounter slip out of my control.

“Alrauns are mandrake roots,
mandragora
, prized for their uncanny resemblance to the human form and a mainstay of witchcraft and alchemy. Rudolf especially cherished those sprouting beneath the gallows. Homunculus roots thought to grow when semen dripped from the corpse of a hanged man and into the soil below, impregnating the earth. The Emperor was known to order the skeletons of executed criminals exhumed so that moss growing upon their skulls might be scraped off and used in various elixirs and alembics.”

“Kinda like a medieval wheat grass shot?”

The curator grunted, no sense of humor. I followed him up the stairs, past the second story landing, across the third floor hallway, and through a doorway on the left until we arrived inside an empty room. An opened window looked out over the Čertovka canal, across at the buildings on Kampa Island less than twenty feet away. A breeze carried in the damp smell of the water below as the curator moved toward the window. I thought of how the canal got it's name—the Devil's Stream—and wondered which of the nearby houses the superstitious medieval villagers had painted all those devils on.

“See that line there?” He pointed to a diffuse, chalky white mark about three inches wide that ran horizontally across the length of the building opposite, just above the second story. “That's the watermark. Floodwaters reached nearly four meters in
this area. Happens once every hundred years or so. Despite official warnings, people were slow to believe it was really going to be a centenarian.”

“A what?”

“Hundred-years flood.” The guy grinned, showing off again. “Czechs of my generation have a natural distrust of authority, I suppose. A shame considering once every hundred years or so, the authorities get something right.”

Glancing out the window, I saw trees rustle on the other side of the Devil's Stream, throwing fitful shadows over the narrow channel of dull water below. “Transportation was already a mess by the time we got moving, and our only option was to shuttle objects to the upper floors. The Rudolf exhibit, books and postcards, computers, office equipment, rugs, chairs—everything was moved to the room you're now standing in. Five years ago, we had locks on the door, motion detectors, sensors on the windows. Any breach of the system generated a phone call to a private security firm. Cost a fortune. At the time I saw it as a good long-term investment.”

He gestured mock grandiose at the naked walls enclosing us, where nothing was left of the security apparatus. “At the risk of sounding sentimental, I will say this for the Communists—they kept a lid on crime. Granted they were all arch criminals. With wolves guarding the hen house, you may not have hens for long, but at least you don't have to worry about foxes.”

“Is art theft a big problem here?”

He shrugged. “Walk down Wenceslas Square and ask one hundred people about big problems, and not a single one will mention anything to do with art. But yes, in the early post-Soviet years, democracy and freedom first manifested themselves in a criminal free-for-all. Didn't help that our then-playwright president all but emptied the prisons. Having spent so much time
locked up himself, I suppose he could be forgiven. And yes, this transitional lawlessness extended to the art world. Works forgotten for decades under the Soviets suddenly began disappearing from churches, museums, galleries, homes. Seven years after what your foreign journalist brethren dubbed the Velvet Revolution, former members of the secret police staged a heist at the National Museum and walked out with some two-dozen important works. Just a couple years ago, rare pistols from the Napoleonic Battle of Three Emperors at Slavkov were taken in broad daylight. The culprits were caught trying to pawn them off on a local antique dealer just around the corner from the exhibit. Hardly
The Thomas Crown Affair
. Your average art thief, thankfully, proves no smarter than your average car thief.”