Hot Siberian (11 page)

The slivovitz arrived. François gave the killer hardly time to swallow it. They left the cafe at forty minutes past nine. Outside on the wide major street called Wenceslas, François said, “I'm staying at the Intercontinental,” assuming that would be their immediate destination.

Before François could hail a taxi, the killer said, “I want to see the clock. When I come to Prague I always see the clock.”

“Tomorrow,” François said dismissively, not knowing or caring what clock the Czech had in mind.

“It is better at night,” the killer said, and without another word he made off up Wenceslas Street in the direction of the river. François mentally stomped his foot but wasn't going to be left standing there. He caught up with the Czech at the corner. They crossed and entered Melantrichova Street. At once the quality of the atmosphere was changed. This was Old Town Prague with its mazed chasms of narrow, barely lighted passageways. The Gothic structures on each side loomed so close above the illusion was that they were precarious, about to tumble and crash with their stony tops.

“You know where you're going, I hope,” François said, irritated. He loathed the feel of the cobblestones through his thin-soled shoes. Normally he avoided adventures such as this.

Soon they arrived at a square and a large fourteenth-century building. It was Prague's Old Town Hall. The killer stood before it, gazing up at its illuminated clock. François paced impatiently around him. A number of other persons, evidently tourists, were there to see the striking of the hour. From out of the ornate fretwork above the clock came the carved life-sized figures of Christ and his disciples. In procession they made their forever-fixed appearances. Following along was the figure of death—robed, bony-faced, toothy death, with his inevitable scythe in hand. Death came rather jerkily to center position, bowed once, and made his exit.

“Macabre,” remarked François, scringing up his nose.

“This is your first time in Prague?” the killer asked.

François said it was.

Prague because it was in these times sexually less dangerous than, for example, Rome or Paris, the killer concluded. Otherwise this François wouldn't have given the place a second thought. “You will enjoy Prague,” the killer promised.

“I'm sure,” François said. “Now, which way is the hotel?”

There were no taxis. The square had quickly emptied. The killer led the way back into the confusion of medieval passageways. François reacted to the press of the darkness, the black angles, the sparse and transient geometrics of lights. It pushed talk out of him. In rapid French he told the killer that he was a hair stylist for a well-known salon on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. He'd done many famous heads. They requested him, demanded him. The price the salon was now charging its clients for his services was outrageous. Photographs of some of his coiffures had been featured in the last collection issue of
Paris Vogue
, he said.

All lies. François worked for a travel agency located on rue Tronchet near the Madeleine. He spent most of his salary on his wardrobe. This trip to Prague was, for promotional reasons, free.

The killer stopped on the pretense of retying his shoelace. A glance in both directions told him the dark passageway was deserted. He reached down and removed the knife from the sheath strapped to his left ankle. Both edges of the knife's six-inch blade were finely honed. An inch from its sharp point was a series of alternately angled serations. It was a military night fighter's knife.

François never saw it. As the killer straightened up, François stepped to him. He couldn't have been more accommodating. As a woman might do, he placed his forearms on the killer's shoulders, left and right, twined his fingers, and drew the killer's head to his own for a kiss, an aggressive tonguing kiss that might also help offset his nervousness. His lips were open and anticipating the soft strength of the killer's mouth when the knife went into him. With a powerful upward thrust it penetrated just below the rib cage. The blade was so sharp and its entry so right that any resistance was barely felt as it went in to its hilt. The killer worked the blade from side to side, trying for the heart. Somehow it didn't find the heart; however, it easily sliced through numerous blood vessels, including the left pulmonary artery. The killer, making sure, withdrew two-thirds of the blade and shoved it in again at a different angle, severing the inferior vena cava.

There had been no struggle or sound. With the entry of the blade François had gone up on his toes, stiffly. He hadn't screamed, although he probably felt he had. His head snapped back and his eyes opened wide, as though his eyes realized that the sliver of sky between the rooftops above would be their final sight.

The killer removed the knife and let François drop. He quickly wiped the blade and his hand on François's jacket and walked away at a normal pace. When he reached Dvorakova Street he went into a bar. Not for a drink. He didn't need a drink. He used the telephone, dialed the number he had memorized, the same number as before. The same anonymous voice answered. The killer did not know what was meant when he said only what he had been told to say: “It is now up to you.”

Milan Sikma was the supervising medical examiner for the city of Prague. It was an appointed position which Sikma had held for nineteen years. At age seventy-two he was a bureaucratic fixture who only considered retiring each winter when the weather turned bad and another year was in its throes. Winter, of course, was symbolic to him and psychologically affecting. Each year, despite his dislike for having to wrap himself up and waterproof his feet whenever he went out, Sikma pushed through the days, and spring eventually came to his rescue.

He was a short, portly man with a wheeze and did not move about quickly. Once, a few years ago, his reflexes had surprised him when, while trying to cross slushy, busy Husitska Street, he'd darted back to the curb to keep from being struck by a van. The incident caused him to wonder if there wasn't a whole other repressed self within him, a self quite agile, able to scurry and bound about. The possibility was entertaining, but it did not motivate him. He continued on at his usual velocity. Accept it, he was a type, he thought, an old type so solidified by repetition and habitual perspective that even the most radical chopping away wouldn't bring about a change. What could he do about all those folds of chin that made it so difficult to shave each morning? What could he do about the red and yellow in the whites of his eyes? His nose and ears that had become larger? His white hair that was distributed around his skull skin like some ancient awarded wreath? He no longer went to the dentist to have his teeth looked at. When his wife reminded him that he should, he mumbled affirmatively and remained faithful to the belief that his teeth would outlast him. Who should know the human body and all its parts better than he, especially his own very human body?

Sikma was a qualified doctor, a graduate of the University of Prague Medical School. During his training days he'd wanted to be at various times a cardiologist, a radiologist, a dermatologist, and a surgeon. He knew that to make the most of his career he should specialize, but, try as he did, he couldn't keep his mind made up. He'd set his aim only to be distracted by a different direction. As a result he got a rather scattered medical education and ended up as what he deprecatingly considered a catch-all doctor, one who merely examined and examined and referred and referred. Sikma was too disappointed in himself to start a private practice. The municipal job as one of the assistants to the medical examiner was as much dividend as he deserved, he felt. That he had always excelled at anatomy would help. When in 1969 the supervising medical examiner died of alcoholism and barbiturates, it was Sikma who had the seniority, who got the appointment, who got the raise that went along with it, and the authority.

It was also Sikma who, that Saturday night shortly after ten, got the telephone call from the killer. He understood the killer's cryptic message. He'd been expecting the call all week. Each time the phone had rung he'd answered it before his wife could get to it. That was the only thing about it that bothered him, having to be so obligated to the phone. Last November he'd had to wait ten days for the call. The time before that, though, it had surprisingly been only one day. What could he expect—killings precisely scheduled? Oh well, now that he'd received the call he could relax and let the thing run its predictable course.

He went into the kitchen for some slices of his favorite Cesnekovy salami, chunks of dark bread, and some sour pickles. He uncapped a cold bottle of strong Urguell Pilsner and poured it fast so it got a three-inch head. Urguell had been his beer for fifty years. Other beers didn't even taste like beer to him. He took his Urguell and food into the living room and situated himself comfortably on the sofa. A replay of a Heinz football game was on the television. Simka wasn't interested and the reception was worse than usual, but he watched anyway.

The body of François Jean Doulard was found twice.

First by a cello teacher on his way home from an excruciating lesson. While kneeling to feel for the beat of François's heart, the teacher happened to feel François's wallet. He would let someone else notify the police.

Such as a restaurant hostess who lived in the building right there. The contorted sprawl of François blocked her way. She thought she was being inconvenienced by a drunk, and when she got no response from her demands that the son of a bitch move, she warily jabbed hard at him with the high heel of her shoe, then added some jabs too vicious for any living person to endure. She gingerly stepped over the dead man and went up to her apartment.

The police, in excess number, arrived in a needless rush. They performed their measuring. They photographed. They took a statement from the hostess. They searched the area for the murder weapon and found the victim's emptied wallet. An air of bustle and excitement prevailed for nearly two hours. Then, with the removal of the victim's body, everyone departed, the narrow passageway was again dark, and, except for the considerable blood that had jelled in the concavities between the cobbles, it was as though nothing had occurred.

Investigation of the Doulard murder was under the charge of Inspector Mikhal Vodácký. He personally would not be out trying to assemble some sense of it, but all information would come to him and he would make the conclusions.

Vodácký's conscientiousness was thickly crusted over. He no longer saw murder as a challenge or a professional insult. No matter how cold- or hot-blooded or gruesome, when it came to those whose breathing had been unlawfully stopped, Vodácký put them into one scurfy lot. His mental picture of them was an accumulated spherical shape, their identities lost in coagulation, just legs, arms, entrails, and sexual parts protruding. This sphere of his was often added to, as it was now by the Doulard case. However, it never seemed to get larger, just more dense. It was, Vodácký realized, a Kafkaesque concept, and he had never confided it to anyone. He was now in his mid-fifties and planned to retire from the police and Prague when he was exactly sixty, while he still had an adequate number of uncudgeled brain cells.

Monday morning when Vodácký received a phone call from the French consul, inquiring about the Doulard murder, he was glad he was able to say what the consul wanted to hear—that this murder did not fit the pattern of the five other murders of French nationals that had occurred in Prague over the past two years. What set this murder apart from the others was its robbery motive, the victim's emptied wallet found less than a block away. It made the thing as clichéd as the traditional demand “Your money or your life!” In this instance both were taken.

Vodácký knew how convenient it was for him that there'd been a robbery involved. To emphasize that motive, he told himself, was his prerogative. That someone out there in Prague disliked the French enough to do away with five or six of them, so far, had understandably aroused concern from official France and the Czech Ministry of Tourism. The Sûreté had dug hard and deep in every thinkable direction, hoping to prove out its belief that the victims shared some denominator. Nationality, gender, and Prague were the only meaningful things in common. The Sûreté had pressed at a rather high level for permission to send some of its experts to Prague to assist in the investigation. Was the Sûreté questioning Czech competence? Permission was denied. The last thing Vodácký wanted was a pack of pompous Sûreté sleuths all over him. Truth be known, he'd experienced a number of obnoxious French sorts whom he, himself, wouldn't have minded adding to his secret sphere.

The Doulard murder could not be just offhandedly dismissed, of course. Doulard's room at the Intercontinental was thoroughly searched, all his personal possessions gone through. Found among them were thirty-four color photographs graphically depicting various male homosexual sadomasochistic, anal, and oral acts, which added another facet to the possible murder motive. Some of Doulard's movements in Prague were determined, including, most importantly, his visit to the Café de l'Europa. Questioning revealed that he'd left the café with another man around nine-thirty. Waiters and bartenders, when asked to describe the other man, said he had wavy red hair, straight gray hair, a mustache, no mustache. He was wearing a brown suit. He had on a black suit. He was in his twenties, in his forties, slim, heavyset, fair-skinned, swarthy. One waiter said he was certain the man was carrying a cane and he definitely remembered a black hat.

Thus Vodácký had no evidence and only contradictions to go on, and the robbery motive actually did seem most plausible. On Monday afternoon as Vodácký was passing by the office of Medical Examiner Sikma, he felt like going in and imploring Sikma not to find anything that would entangle this neat, explicable French murder. Ironically, what Sikma could have given Vodácký was absolute assurance that he wouldn't.