The shop is closed, I tell him, but if he would kindly return in the morning, I will be more than happy to show him my wares. The man
makes no reply. He is dressed in a narrow-waisted Beiderbecke overcoat and a battered stovepipe hat that stays improbably in place despite the wind. Silvery hair falls over his ears and down his back while his face remains veiled in shadow. This human spire of a man wields a smart black cane capped by a solid gold handle in the shape of a bear's head. A man of no little eccentricity.
I tell him I am truly sorry to keep a gentleman such as himself waiting, but as the sign on the door plainly states, my shop is in operation from 10 AM to 5 PM, and it is going on seven o' clock now.
“I'm told you repair watches,” the man says.
“Repair them I do, howeverâ”
“May we continue this conversation inside?”
Streetlamps still painted over from the September blackouts begin pulsing to life, casting a dull blue pallor over the empty streets. The man takes a step closer, and for the first time I gaze upon his face unobscured, a face neither old nor young, neither handsome nor ugly. The man doesn't look healthy, true, with his sallow skin and sunken eyes. Flesh yellow like an old bruise, eyes hard and luminous yet clouded, darkened with age. Still, there is no obvious feature that forces me to look away, though look away I do, nor any that compels me to dig through my pocket for the keys to unlock the shop, though unlock it I do.
The man enters and I shut the door behind us. He carries with him a smell, malodorous and sickly sweet, the scent of baked lamb left out too long after Easter. The man leans heavily on his cane, hobbling a slow clip-clop rhythm as he wanders the floor, surveying one item after the next with studied leisure. I notice he has a false leg. After the last war, I'd traded in all manner of prosthetics, crutches, wheelchairs. If our nephew is right, a new generation of broken young men will soon be limping through my door. But then if Max is right, I will no longer be behind the counter.
“My name is Doctor KaÄak,” says the man, stopping to gaze reproachfully at a mounted boar's head with splintered tusks. Seeing
my shop through another's eyes, I realize how much it has started to resemble those congested ghetto emporiums of my youth. Arabian camel saddle here, cracked scrimshaw figurine there, unstrung harp, musical snuff box, dressmaker's dummy, glass eyeball, telescope, stroboscope, flotsam, jetsamâwhere had so many unloved things come from? Why had they all come here?
Suddenly weary and knowing Franz will be upstairs waiting, I regret opening the shop. “What can I do for you, Doctor KaÄak? You mentioned a watch?”
“An old watch,” he says. “Of little value beyond the sentimental, but I've grown as accustomed to its ticking as to the beating of my own heart. But it's ticking faster now, gaining dangerous speed, and I fear it may soon wear itself out. The watch, that is. Not my heart, knock wood.”
Doctor KaÄak raps the cane against his false leg.
“Time is critical as I may be soon be traveling,” he resumes. “The watch must be returned in three days. You will, of course, be generously compensated for your expediency.”
“Have you brought the piece with you?”
Doctor KaÄak hooks the protruding bear's snout of his cane handle over his forearm and removes his stovepipe hat with a magician's flourish. Animated by static charge, wisps of fine, silvery hair spring from his scalp in every direction. The man reaches into the hollow of his hat and withdraws a bundle of black velvet cloth. Judging by the bundle's size, the watch is quite large, roughly the circumference of a tea saucer. He places this bundle gently on the counter, flashes his gray teeth, and then slowly unwraps it, fold by delicate fold, until the piece lies naked before me.
My eyes first land upon the exquisite ivory inlay, the heraldic White Lion gleaming upon the watch's case. My mouth goes dry; sweat beads my upper lip. How I wish to seize the watch, to flip it over and look for the telltale sign! But I resist, rummaging for words, any will do,
but all I can summon is a weak cough. Maybe, just maybe, there is a future for me and God's Miracle after all. Doctor KaÄak replaces the empty hat on his silvery head and proffers a showman's grin.
“You were expecting, perhaps, a rabbit?”
Â
Â
Several things happen in a blurred succession before this strange man takes his leave. He provides a down payment and I provide him a receipt. He gives me the watch and I am shocked to discover it still ticking, in fine working condition despite being, if my estimation is correct, more than three hundred years old. My amazement is surely evident because before I can utter a word, he insists the watch must be ticking when I return it. He further insists it must never cease ticking. As a condition of accepting this commission, I agree to repair the piece without allowing the watch to cease its movements for even a moment. He is deadly serious, and I have no wish to tell him what he is asking is akin to changing an automobile tire while motoring down a mountain road. I don't trust myself to say anything at all and can scarce even breathe until he clip-clops out of my shop, the door catching the wind and thundering closed behind him.
Here at last I've found the proper beginning of my long, final farewell. But alas, now the sun is fully risen, the day bearing down with important work to be done. I shall resume our correspondence this evening. And no more false starts, my darling. The next beginning, I promise, shall be the last.
Â
Ever yours,
Jan
CHAPTER 7
W
enceslas Square was not a square at all but a broad avenue hemmed by trees and spacious sidewalks stretching beneath the shadow of the huge National Museum. The towering nineteenth-century estates lining the avenue had since been gutted to house global retailers like Nike and Benetton along with luxury hotels and high-wattage casinos. Once the site where a student named Jan Palach set himself on fire to protest the Soviet Invasion of 1968, and later the gathering point of mass protests that brought down the Communists, it was now the city's biggest shopping arcade and swirled with a constant motion bordering on vertiginous. Starved beyond reason, I bought a sausage from a street cart and swore it was the best sausage I'd ever eaten in my life no matter what counter arguments my stomach might later make. At the far end of the avenue stood Vera's man-on-ahorse statue, a fifty-foot-high monument of St. Wenceslas planted at the base of the museum. Appropriate St. Wenceslas should be depicted atop his steed, as the area had been a horse market in medieval times, this according to
Prague Unbound
, which I'd been forced to carry by hand since the last time I'd tried to pocket it as
the task had proven impossible. At least my suit had finally dried. No sooner did the thought arrive than it started raining.
I ducked into an arcade to wait out the downpour. A narrow hallway wound past an array of interchangeable strip clubs with identical purple neon lights running the perimeters of their black smoked windows. The air was nicotine stale and reverberating with a low bass that pulsed behind the walls while the floor was painted with arrows promising a casino just ahead which always failed to materialize. I found an Internet café before plumbing too far into the building's depths. Five old PCs lined up against the wall in a room the size of a mini-van. It was the kind of place I imagined Al-Qaeda operatives sending untraceable messages to each other between visits to the Atlantis Lounge and the Kitty Kat Cabaret.
I tried checking my work e-mail, but the server at Grimley & Dunballer Recovery Solutions kept rejecting my password. No matter; my job already felt like part of a former life.
Next I googled
Czech + News + English
and reached the
Prague Post's
online edition. The lead story was about Parliament postponing a debate on whether one of its members should be stripped of immunity as he was suspected of having tortured people while working as a prison guard under the former Communist regime. Sparta Prague was warning its fans against racist chants when the club faced Arsenal in an upcoming Champions League game. The price of poultry was on the rise. In the crime section, police were investigating the disappearance of an ATM in Kutná Hora. Six employees from a hospital in LitomÄÅice were being charged with organ trafficking. I checked a couple other news sites, but unearthed nothing about a Malá Strana art gallery curator found dead in the Äertovka canal.
Like Detective Soros, Bob Hannah hadn't mentioned anything about the Rudolf Complication. Made sense as most of his
information about my brother's case came from the detective. More importantly, it underscored my suspicion that Soros hadn't tied my brother's disappearance to the watch theft. Meaning Vera's secret really was a secret. Problem was, my presence at the Black Rabbit last night had essentially cemented her link to my brother, and I wondered how long it would be until Soros started pestering her. Maybe it would be best to warn her about him before she decided I'd broken my promise. Or maybe it would be better to wait. She might not believe me, and I couldn't have her clamming up if I was ever to have a chance at finding out who this Martinko KlingÃ¡Ä was. And if I did find out, what then? Still seemed too remote a possibility to worry over.
Googling Martinko KlingÃ¡Ä yielded only links to an animated DVD of the Slovak fairytale and some rock band's outdated MySpace page. Thinking maybe the last owner of the Rudolf Complication might lead somewhere, I tried searching “Martin Novotny” and got about forty thousand results. Guess it was a common name. Narrowing that to news results only brought the links number down to four hundred. Sorting by date, I found what I'd been looking for, sort of. Two barebones paragraphs on the English language website
praguedaily.com
said a dead body discovered on the third floor of an abandoned textile factory in StraÅ¡nice had been identified as Martin Novotny, an unemployed twenty-eight-year-old man originally from Brno who had twice served time for burglary and petty theft. Nothing about him being the victim of a reverse defenestration, nothing about his previous “ownership” of the Rudolf Complication. The article said foul play was suspected, but the paper hadn't run any follow-up story, so I assumed no arrests were ever made. “Man Found Dead in StraÅ¡nice Factory” was just one of those stories about one of those nobodies that crops up, goes nowhere, and disappears. Not unlike “American Missing and Presumed Drowned in KarlÃn.”
Clicking on the most viewed stories, I ended up on an article about the upcoming 650
th
birthday celebration planned for the Charles Bridge. Story said the bridge was founded in 1357 on July 9 at 5:31 AM, a date chosen as its odd primary numbers ran palindromicallyâ1 /3/5/7/9/7/5/3/1. I found it interesting, although I didn't know who I planned on impressing with this knowledge. The story was a couple months old now; the party had already come and gone.
Outside it had stopped raining.
I logged off and made my way to the statue.
There were lots of people hanging out by the man on the horse but not so many I worried I'd miss her. A few gangster slash pimp types were milling around near dodgy looking side streets. Some had greasy hair, but I could imagine none being nicknamed Martinko KlingáÄ. Somehow I was sure he wasn't just some street corner hoodlum. I kept envisioning a James Bond villain. Elegantly dressed, sitting in a wheelchair and stroking a cat, maybe a chinchilla. I was sure he wasn't that either.
With all the people-watching, I'd failed to notice Vera standing just a few feet away. I don't know how long she'd been there, eyeing me with a slightly startled expression, eyebrows inward bent, lips fractionally parted. She was looking straight at me, but it was obvious it wasn't me she was seeing. I'd encountered this same dazed expression on the faces of my brother's friends once or twice since he'd died. It took me awhile to realize they were just seeing Paul. Not the Paul they knew, but an older version, one of many possible Pauls now impossible. So it was with Vera. All at once something in her eyes receded and her mouth hardened and she was just seeing good ol' Lee again. There were no pleasantries though. She didn't say hello or anything else, just took my arm as if it was the most natural thing in the world and started walking.
A few minutes later we were inside another palatial shopping
arcade, this one more upscale. Checkerboard marble floors, broad columns, high domed ceilings. Dangling suspended from the center of a giant stained glass skylight was another sculpture of St. Wenceslas on his horse. In this version the horse was upside down, hooves pointed skyward, head limp and dangling open mouthed toward the floor while King Wenceslas nonchalantly straddled his belly.
We moved up a sweeping staircase into a café on the second floor and took a table in the corner. Polished dark wood, waiters in immaculate white aprons. Vera removed her coat and I placed
Prague Unbound
in an empty chair. I'd thought the book's cover was black and was surprised to find it was actually a dark shade of green. Funny the things we misremember.
Vera and I both waited for the other to speak. Her eyes were glazed over as if she'd just woken, no jewelry, no make-up. Her hair looked lifeless, blacker and longer somehow than it had been the night before.
I pulled my jacket close around me, the too-long sleeves reaching past my wrists.
“I am prepared to speak with you for one hour,” she began. “I will answer your questions, the ones I can answer. My hope is at the end of one hour you will no longer consider involving the police. But I can't prevent you. Whatever you choose to do, you must agree to one condition. We must never see each other again.”