Walking in ever-widening circles for nearly forty minutes, I am unable to locate Franz until I reach the banks of the river near the Cechlův bridge. There at last I discover him in the company of a small girl. Both are laughing hysterically for reasons fathomable to only the young and the cerebrally compromised, but the girl stops laughing abruptly as I approach. No more than seven or eight years old, she is clad in a moth-eaten red dress; her face is fixed in an expression beyond her years as she twirls a grubby lock of hair around a grubby finger. She is no doubt one of the recent émigrés The Little Mustache has thrust upon us, and wherever she has fled from must be a desolate place. Never mind a coat, the wretch hasn't even shoes. And when she smiles, I can't help but recoil. The wretch hasn't even teeth.
Before I can inquire after her parents she is already gone, moving down the street with a disquieting sense of purpose, as if late for an appointment with her bank manager. Franz laughs all the way home. The sound scatters sparrows from the trees.
When we finally arrive suppertime has long since passed. While Franz sits at the table, I prepare rolls and a simple soup. No sooner is the meal complete than I turn to find God's Miracle face down, arms sprawled across the small dining room table. He looks somehow even larger when asleep, his body uncoiling from its inward slouch, shoulders loosened, limbs expanding in repose. The peaceful tableau is mitigated by his usual snore, an industrial cacophony of some machine beyond repair.
As he sleeps my mind turns to last May when a regimental commander came pounding at our apartment door, demanding that one Private Franz Murcek immediately report to his garrison for re-mobilization. I was about to spit in the man's face when Franz came lumbering into the room in his tattered army coat, braying and clapping his meaty hands. The chastened commander sized up the situation at once, apologized for intruding, and, before retreating down the stairs,
congratulated me on having a son worthy of so many high military honors.
The medals are still there now, pinned willy-nilly all over Franz's filthy jacket. Their original owners often parted with them for less than the equivalent of two drinks at the Twice Slaughtered Lamb. In the twenty years since the Great War has ended, I have bestowed upon Franz the War Cross, the Commemorative Cross, the Medal of the Revolution, the Žižka Medal, the Order of the Sokol, and even the Order of the White Lion, making our son surely the most decorated soldier in all of Czechoslovakia. He seems to enjoy the way they jingle, how they twinkle in the light.
I jaw my pipe and gaze out the window.
Beneath Franz's snoring, I begin to detect the faintest echo of another sound. A low, dull, quick sound like a muted heartbeat. I try to locate its source, but it doesn't seem to being coming from anywhere in the room. I cup my hand to the wall. The unwavering rhythm grows louder. The White Lion medal pinned to Franz's shoulder glints in lamplight, and I flash to the miniature ivory heraldic on Doctor KaÄak's watch and realize what I am hearing.
Rudolf II's watch, of course.
Doctor KaÄak's watch. My watch.
The Murcek Complication.
Across the room, Franz wakes with a start, hopping to his feet and swiveling his head in wide-eyed alarm. When he spots me his features slur into a grin, and he wipes the spittle from his chin. Call me a sentimentalist, but it warms my heart to know Franz is still comforted by my presence. How many fathers of my age are still needed by their sons? How many of my generation needed by the world at all?
“Report to bed, private,” I say.
Ever the disciplined soldier, Franz ignores the sound, rises dutifully, and thumps down the hallway, lurching into his room and collapsing
into bed without removing his boots. We bachelors have become more eccentric in habit and appearance in your absence, Klara. Let the outside world keep up its regimented charade of order and progress, see where it leads them. I pocket my pipe, walk down the hallway, and gently close the door on God's Miracle.
The ticking continues unabated. When I attempt to relight my pipe, I can't concentrate for the sound reverberating throughout the apartment. It has now grown loud enough to eclipse God's Miracle's freshly resumed snoring.
And then I realize it's not a ticking at all.
It's a knocking sound.
There is someone downstairs, rapping at the door to Murcek's Curios and Antiquities. My heart leaps throat-ward and my mind fixes on an image of Doctor KaÄak tilted against the wind, wisps of silver hair dancing behind him as he beats the golden bear's head cane handle against the door with inhuman, metronomic precision. He has come because he has changed his mind. He has sensed my intentions. He is here to reclaim the Complication.
I move across the floor, extinguishing lights as I pass, and edge up against the window frame. With the store awning directly beneath my window, I can't even see the street below much less any figure who may be standing outside the door. I hold my breath and press my palms to my ears but it only amplifies the sound. The knocker will not go away.
It's impossible to say how the idea of killing Dr. KaÄak first enters my brain, but once conceived, it's as if the notion had been there all along, just waiting to be discovered. I'm sure this revelation shocks you, Klara, but I have suffered enough cruel luck for one lifetime, only to have a last-minute reprieve fall into my lap. They say there is nothing so dangerous as hope, and maybe it's true because whereas only yesterday I was a hopeless but peaceful man, as I listen to the endless rapping, I know I'm prepared to do anything to protect the one chance Franz and I have left.
I will invite the doctor into the shop under the pretense of letting him warm up inside while I fetch the watch and return his depositâdisappointed at losing the commission, but understanding nonetheless. One good blow to the head with my weapon of choice and I can then drag him into the basement and finish the deed using any number of implements.
I scan the room for a suitable weapon, debating the merits of the butcher knife versus the heavy iron fire poker. In the end, I snatch up the fire poker, gauging the weapon's heft as I descend the stairs in time to the thumping at the door. As I get closer I detect another noise, a twinned sound of the Complication ticking in perfect time to the Doctor KaÄak's rapping. Obviously he can also hear its ticking, even outside amidst the howling wind, and is making a show of keeping time with his treasure. The thought realizes itself ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than its thinker creeping down the stairs, fire poker in hand, poised to murder a stranger.
The glass eye of a mounted boar's head winks in the dark as I enter the shop and move toward the entrance. Behind my back my right hand grips the fire poker tight, my own thudding heartbeat now filling in the caesuras between the hammering from the other side and the ticking down below. I undo the lock and open the door.
A blast of inrushing wind nearly blinds me. For a moment I can make out only a silhouette, the form of a half-slumped man leaning forward, one arm braced against the doorframe. He raises his head and his eyes seek mine in the dark.
“Uncle Jan,” the man says. Even with the wind, the smell of alcohol is overpowering. Our nephew Max tries to stand unaided and totters back a step before righting himself. Eyes glassy and distant, grin wet and smeared across his face, he's evidently been celebrating his chess victory ever since we parted at the Black Rabbit earlier this evening. “Did I wake you? I knocked as softly as I could. So soft, so soft. Did I wake Franz?”
My grip, my whole body loosens.
“What the devil are you doing?” I ask, pulling him inside. As I close the door he notices the fire poker I still hold in my right hand and lets out a laugh, freeing himself from my hold.
“When they come knocking you'll need more than that.”
“You're drunk. What is it you want?”
“Why aren't you drunk? Why isn't everybody?” His head swivels loose on his shoulders as he takes in the shop inventory with a look of bemused disapproval. “You've become an old fool. I'm here to beg you anyway. Come with me. I won't ask again.”
“There's no need. I've decided we'll go.”
“I'm not going to debate you,” he slurs, the alcohol stoppering his ears even as it strengthens his resolve. “The train leaves Wilson station the day after tomorrow. I've tickets for both you and Franz. I'll be waiting on the platform. And then I'll be on the train. And I then I will be gone.”
He presses an envelope into my hand.
Once again I labor to explain that I've already made the decision to join him on this hair-brained expedition to America and that his besotted theatrics are as unbecoming as they are unnecessary, but he dismisses my words with a clumsy wave and yanks open the front door. “One other thing,” he mumbles, his coat tails flapping in the wind. “There was a way out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This afternoon. In our match. You weren't beaten, not yet. There was a way out. Only you didn't see it. You know why?”
I nodded only because he'd tell me anyway.
“Because there is something in you that wants to lose, Uncle Jan. Something that yearns to be punished. And if you stay, you will lose. You'll lose everything.”
With this he turns and rambles down the street without even bothering to close the door, leaving me standing on my shop floor holding
train tickets in one hand and a fire poker in the other. A fresh gust of arctic air brings me to my senses, and I close the door.
The ticking sound has abated.
Maybe it was never there to begin with.
To begin with, beginnings, endingsâI'm afraid I have once again failed to bring my farewell to a conclusion or even a suitable commencement. There is much more to tell, and in its telling I am racing to the end of me, even as I resist it.
Â
Ever yours,
Jan
CHAPTER 9
T
he ex-detective Soros was wearing a stocking cap pulled down to his eyebrows, and his eyes beneath were bleary and red-rimmed in the rearview mirror as he ripped his tin can Skoda around the corner of the quiet residential street and merged onto the wider StÅeÅ¡ovická. I was sitting in the back, taxicab style, but had no choice since the front seat was awash with papers. The car doubled as his office. Right Hand of God investigatory headquarters on wheels. I guess I should've been grateful he'd shown up when he did because the rain was coming down hard now, the sound like fevered applause as it pounded the roof of the car. For a while Soros didn't speak, preferring to roll his tongue around the inside of his mouth like a good opening line was located somewhere between his cheek and gum if only he could find it.
“You follow Vera,” he said. “Why?”
“All due respect, it doesn't really concern you.”
He growled something in Czech and leaned into the horn. A small truck in the road ahead of us was carrying a payload of unsecured copper pipes that rolled and bounced around in the back. One good bump, they'd come spearing through our windshield.
“Titass fuck thieves,” Soros cursed. “You think those metal are belong to them? Last month they steal a bridge in Chleb. Whole fucking bridgeâpoof! Gone, taken for metal. Cockeats, from the mouth of their dog mothers they would steal teeth. Why do you follow Vera Svobodova?”
“I might ask you the same,” I said. “Or are you following me?”
He reached in his pocket, extracted a bottle.
“Becherovka?” he offered.
“What's it, some kind of liquor?”
“No, magic piss. From the goat who is fucks on your sister. You want or no?”
I chose the latter. He unscrewed the cap, took a swig, and tucked it back into his jacket pocket. The stuff smelled like cough medicine mixed with grain alcohol. A Tweety Bird air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror did a jaunty little dance as Soros yanked the steering wheel sideways and hit the accelerator. Empty beer cans rattled around the car. As we pulled beside the truck carrying the supposed thieves, Soros rolled down the window and half climbed out, rain pelting his face as he spat obscenities at them. He looked like some crazed mariner chained to the helm of his ship, barking at the heavens, but I don't think the two guys inside the truck even noticed. Moments later, Soros sank back into his seat and rolled the window back up with one hand and wiped the rain from his face with the other, leaving the car to steer itself for a moment. Just as well. The car wasn't drinking Becherovka.
“Vera is not the person you think.” He wrapped his hands around the wheel again. “You are in danger, man. Big danger. Today a man is attacked in Malá Strana. Beaten and thrown out a window. The police they find him under a wheelbarrow. Hiding from this man who tries to kill him.”
I almost started laughing with relief. The curator was alive.
“The man suffers from a coma now,” Soros said.
“Is it a bad coma, orâ”
“No, good coma! Big tit coma!” spat Soros. “This man works at an art gallery. You know who works there five years ago? Vera Svobodova. She has a file. Criminal record. Friend with the police, he gets it for me. Drugs. Drug dealing. Big drug ring.”
“When was this?”
“First we must be friends. Tell me of her, we can be friends. If no, fuck on you.”
“I think you're barking up the wrong tree.”