Complication (31 page)

“Enough!” she cried. “Just stop!”

Moments later, she slammed the car to a halt on the sidewalk in front of her Smíchov apartment building, vaulted out, and disappeared around the corner. Why were we stopping? I sat in a car parked halfway on the sidewalk and blocking the entrance into Erotic World and waited. I tried gauging how much time had passed by the beating of my own heart but lost track of the pulses. Then I took out the map, the one the journalist had given me.

Tik-tak
. Same words the creepy little girl had spoken.

Why would Klingáč make some sort of game of it? He was either going to kill Tomáš or he wasn't, but it was useless pretending he was operating on any kind of rational level, that he'd left a puzzle to be solved.

Tick-tock
.

Still no sign of Vera. I started getting claustrophobic in the car, so I got out and strolled up the embankment, toward the river. I was only twenty, thirty yards away from the car and would be able to see when Vera came back out. I took a deep breath, rubbed my face with my palms. In the distance beyond, I could just make out the Charles Bridge and its blackened saints. I recalled the newspaper story, the one about the bridge's birthday. How the bridge had been founded some date chosen where the odd primary numbers ran palindromically.

1/3/5/7/9/7/5/3/1.

I ran down the hill just as Vera emerged from her apartment building with a shoebox under her arm, and suddenly it all clicked into place. What was it Martinko Klingáč wanted in exchange for Tomáš' life? Of course. The same thing he'd wanted
five years ago. A watch. A large watch worn around the neck, an old watch roughly the size of a tea saucer, small enough to fit inside a shoebox. A watch that went both clockwise and counterclockwise, that ran backwards and forwards. Like a palindrome.

Like
no pets step on
.

Like
racecar
.

Like
don't nod
.

Like Soros.

With that I understood the detective was no black sheriff for Martinko Klingáč. He
was
Martinko Klingáč. My presence at the Black Rabbit had led him straight to Vera. He might have gotten to her anyway, but I'd hastened it along, solidified her connection to Paul. The Right Hand of God serial killer stuff had all been just a smoke screen. I don't know why Soros had fed the ex-pat journalist the same line of crap, unless maybe he thought my brother had some connection to him. Maybe he was just fucking with the
Stone Folio
writer because that's what sociopaths like to do. But when he found out that Hannah was onto him—thanks again to me, to the phone call I'd answered in Soros's car—Soros had killed him. While I was busy passing out and coming to and passing out again in Charles Square, he'd left the scene of the accident just like I had, made his way across town, and ripped Hannah's head off. He'd left the Right Hand of God folder behind because it was meaningless now. There was no suspicious detective determined not to let the case die. No odd cop looking to get even for a derailed career.

Only Martinko Klingáč himself.

Vera pulled open the door, got in the car, and handed me the box. It was heavier than I would have thought, but not nearly heavy enough to counterbalance everything weighted against it. Vera had trouble looking me in the eye. She had trouble putting the key in the ignition and had trouble speaking.

“Well, don't you want to see it?” she asked.

I didn't even have to shake my head. She could feel the disgust crawling over me, emanating out in waves. Anything you could fit in a box was not worth my brother's life. I'm sure the journalist's family would've felt the same way. Same for the people close to the old hippie curator in Malá Strana now struggling to emerge from a coma.

And now Vera had decided it wasn't worth her kid's life, either. A morally upstanding conclusion, but one reached too late to do my brother much good. And would she have come to this conclusion if she wasn't already dying?

I thought about her story, her fairytale seven days of rain. How she'd run sloshing up the hill in the downpour and tried to call my brother from a payphone. How someone had answered, how she'd known it was the unknown third man. Maybe my brother had still been alive at that point. Maybe there had still been a chance to save his life if she would have stayed on the line, told Mr. Rumpelstiltskin she had the Rudolf Complication, offered it up in exchange for letting Paul Holloway live.

She nodded toward the map. “What's that?”

“It's from our friend Klingáč.”

“Does it show where he's keeping Tomáš?”

I didn't want to care. Let her reap what she'd sown. But then there was the damn kid. He looked like Paul. Kinda even looked like me. We shared a name. As much as I wanted to let the sins of the father and mother be visited upon the son, the rest of my life would be even more fucked up then it was already bound to be if I had to live knowing I'd let a four-year-old child die when I could've done something to stop it.

If I could do something to stop it.

Tik-tak
.

I needed a plan.

A man, a plan, a canal. Panama.

At that last idiotic palindrome my brain slammed to a full and sudden stop. The mental whiplash must have loosed a syllable or two from my lips because when I looked at Vera, she was staring at me with her eyes wide and quizzical.

“An odd cop looking to get even,” I muttered.

“What cop?”

I didn't answer. But I'd figured it out.

I knew where to find Tomášek.

I knew where to find Martinko Klingáč.

V
era ran her tongue over her lips as her eyes darted from mine to the map and back again. She asked me if I was sure that was the place.

I told Vera I was certain.

I was not within shouting distance of certain.

She put the car in gear and gunned the engine. I put the shoebox housing the Rudolf Complication on the floor. Didn't like the weight of it in my hands, didn't want anything to do with it. Vera kept her eyes glued to the road and her mouth clamped shut. She didn't ask how I suddenly knew where Klingáč would be waiting, which was just as well because explaining how palindromes, the Rudolf Complication, the Right Hand of God,
tik-tak,
and the odd cop getting even all came together in some half-baked geographical guesswork would have taken hours we didn't have, and by the time I was finished, any belief she had in me would have vanished and she'd be back to questioning my mental health.

As we headed southwest I looked at the map again to assure myself the pattern I was seeing was real, not some arrangement I had wished upon it, the way people see Jesus's face in a potato
chip. I'd erased all of the crisscrossing connective lines Soros had drawn, leaving only the dates in place.

At first glance there seemed to be no clear progression from one site to the next. My brother was found in 2002 in Karlín, but in 2003 the alleged Right Hand of God dump site jumped all the way to Vinohrady. In 2004, it was the edge of Stromovka park. The next year, some place called Santoška.

But if I skipped every other year, broke it into odds and evens, a pattern emerged. Following only the even numbered years, the sites traced a predictable, roughly circular route counterclockwise around the city.

The odd numbers did the same, moving clockwise.

Forward and backward at the same time. Like
no pets step on
. Like Soros. Like the Rudolf Complication. Were the initials and dates then just an abstraction, puzzle pieces with no underlying reality? My brother hadn't been an abstraction, and creating this map solely to give me something to decipher didn't make any sense. Did it mean there really was a Right Hand of God killer on the loose? That Soros/Klingáč had in effect been trying to tell first Bob Hannah and then me how to find him?

In crappy thrillers there's often a scene where a psychologist type gives a speech about how every serial killer subconsciously yearns to be caught and punished, which conveniently explains why the killer spent the whole movie leaving not-quite-ingenious-enough clues for some attractive but troubled detective to string together. I didn't believe Martinko Klingáč secretly wanted to get caught, but I discovered that continuing the pattern of odd years would point to a certain spot at the edge of the map, one I'd guided Vera to with more certainty than I felt.

That was as accurate as I could get, and the area would still encompass several blocks. After that we'd just have to trust our luck. Neither of us having had much luck in the luck department lately, maybe we were due.

Vera glided to a halt by the side of the road.

“There,” she said. The space across the street was overgrown with trees, a park or forest preserve though there was no signage to indicate as much. Vera told me to give her the box. I felt the watch shift inside as I handed it to her, heard the smooth whisper of fabric on cardboard from whatever protective cloth the watch was wrapped in.