Lost and Found in Prague (17 page)

“
Father
Borelli,” the detective corrected her.

“Yes,
Father
Borelli, of course.” She slumped back into the seat, let out a deep breath. “A miraculous medal? A good-luck charm?” She laughed, recalling her earlier conversation with Borelli. “Do you believe in miracles?”

“Yes,” he replied without hesitation. She hadn’t expected him to say that. Before she could reply, he added, “The ditch has been covered.”

She glanced out the window. “Just this evening.” They’d evidently finished it while she and Borelli prowled through the church, hopefully before the downpour. She was grateful for that as she wasn’t up to walking down the street to the hotel, then back with her passport. She wondered if Damek would have insisted on going with her. He’d trusted the priest, but she wasn’t sure he’d trust her.

Suddenly, and abruptly, he yanked the steering wheel and they were doing a U-turn right in front of the hotel.

“What the hell?” she shouted, bracing herself against the car door.

“I have an idea,” Investigator Damek said calmly, “and I need your help.”

“What’s going on?” Dana asked, her voice high-pitched, her mind reeling with confusion.

He didn’t reply. They had arrived at the Malostranské námesti and were headed toward the river. A lopsided Cheshire grin of a moon winked behind parting clouds.

“My help?” she asked, trying to calm her voice, attempting to stand up to Damek’s composure. “Where are we going?”

“Three years ago.” He gave the wheel another turn and she guessed they were headed south. “A murder in the theater district. An actress.”

“This relates to what happened at Our Lady Victorious?”

He was slowing down now, but he didn’t answer.

“Or something to do with this Lenka?” Dana asked. “She wasn’t the victim?”

“No.”

Dana glanced at her watch. “It’s almost one
A.M.
”

“Then they will just be starting.”

“Who?”

They turned left, then a sharp veer to the right, passing a slow-moving car, a cab, vehicles parked bumper to bumper. Preoccupied now, it seemed, with finding a parking space, Damek slowed, glancing from side to side. Several people stood, conversing, others entering, some exiting buildings in what looked to be a mixed residential and business area. A group of young men huddled close, shadowed under the eaves of a building. Damek pulled into a space that Dana guessed might not qualify as legal, wedging between a motorcycle and compact minicar. He hopped out, unlocked the back door, opened it, and motioned her onto the street. They walked.

He had a long stride, and she stepped quickly to keep up, hands in the pocket of her hoodie, fingering her flashlight. They passed a couple looped arm-in-arm, walking slowly, another fellow in ratty jeans and a stocking cap, dragging nervously on a cigarette, calling to another young man across the street.

Through a narrow alleylike passageway, past a mismatched duo of bikes—one sleek and flashy, the other with wire basket and makeshift plywood box strapped on the fender, both chained onto a small rack—they arrived at a green lacquered door set into a brick building. Damek held the door and gestured for her to enter.

Lively chatter collided with jazz drifting out from an old-fashioned jukebox in the front of the room. The place smelled of greasy bar food and smoke. Photos and cartoons hung on the walls, like in restaurants back home where the proprietor wished to claim a distinguished, or perhaps just interesting, clientele. Dana guessed that performers hung out here after the theater closed.

At the table nearest the bar, three men and a woman sat engaged in conversation. The woman had long, dark hair, a tight tank top, a tattoo of a snake wrapped around her upper arm. She moved her ornamented limb in a strange, undulating way as if attempting to make the snake slither. One of the men reached out to feel the muscle on her firm and well-defined arm. The man sported spiky, unnaturally blond hair and wore a patterned paisley shirt. The other two seemed rather common, other than the fact that one was wearing a coonskin hat. The guy in the fancy shirt grabbed the hat off the man’s head and passed it around the table to the other, who stood, took an exaggerated bow, then swung it around by the tail.

Damek stepped up to the bar. “You want something?” he asked her.

“Water,” she replied, realizing how dry her throat was.

His eyes darted quickly around the room, and then, without even looking at Dana, he pulled a stool away from the bar and offered it to her. Holding up two fingers, he said something to the bartender.

“Which is Novák?” he asked Dana as he pulled a wrinkled paper from his jacket pocket.

She pointed to the young Pavel in the photo.

Toward the back of the room, two men and a woman shared a table with some kind of furry creature. It
was difficult to make out, the room dim and smoky, but then Dana realized, from the long, thin appendages and agile movement, it was a monkey, outfitted in a diaper, red vest, and hat. Climbing up on the table, it draped itself around the neck of one of the men.

The bartender slid two bottles of water onto the counter along with two glasses set on cardboard pilsner coasters. Damek and the man spoke for several moments, the investigator showing him the photo, the man shaking his head. When the bartender left to help another customer at the end of the counter, Damek took a swig directly from the bottle. Dana poured her water into the glass.

Again Damek studied the crowd as if searching for someone he knew. Dana wondered if any of these people had been here in ’89, during the late-autumn months of the revolution. The dissenters had been mostly young people, students, and theater people, actors, musicians, playwrights, people like those she saw all around her now, though she didn’t recall this same freedom in dress and style back then. Almost twenty years ago—she probably wouldn’t recognize anyone from that long ago. She spotted several people near her age, some even older—a fellow with a neatly trimmed silver goatee and frameless glasses, who looked like a college professor or poet. She wondered if any of them knew Lenka or Pavel. She understood this was why Damek had brought her along, though she wasn’t sure she’d recognize an older Pavel, and she’d never met Lenka.

She noticed three men sitting at a table against the wall, the back of the bald head of the tallest reflecting a collage of light from one of the half dozen Tiffany-like lamps hanging about the room. Though slick as an egg on top, he sported a tuft of pale hair standing out above each ear in a comical fashion like a circus clown. As his head bobbed from side to side, these fluffy protrusions took on a kaleidoscope of spotted color, as did the smooth surface of his head. The man held a child slumped in his lap, dressed all in red, wearing a floppy hat.
At this hour in a bar?
Dana immediately thought, but realized within seconds that it wasn’t a child but a marionette. The man jumped up and, maneuvering the attached strings, lifted the puppet in a well-orchestrated dance, limbs and large eyes coming to life, the lids fluttering with animation. The puppet wore a jester’s costume: red velvet with a wide white ruffled collar, bells adorning the tunic, slippers curled like those of an elf. The mouth was set in a grin, opening and closing as if the marionette could speak. A cigarette dangled from the left side of the man’s mouth. A large duffel bag sat on the floor near his chair and Dana wondered if his small friend would be stuffed inside at night’s end. As she exchanged a quick glance with Damek, Dana could almost detect a smile, and then something in his eyes as if he were about to say,
See how we entertain our visitors in Prague? A performance on every corner.

In a voice that sounded part command and part concern for her safety, Damek said, “Stay here.” She watched as he worked his way around the room, stopping and speaking to the patrons, passing the picture around and then, after negative head shakes, moving on. He walked over to a table where two women sat, both about twenty, bleached blondes with too much makeup. They could have been twins, and Dana imagined them in a chorus line where every girl looked the same as the next. Damek returned to the bar. He said nothing, and she guessed he hadn’t learned anything. He stood, taking another drink of water, still scoping out the room.

Finally Dana asked, “Was there a ladder in the church at the Infant’s altar, when you were called that morning? It
was
Father Ruffino who called?” She spoke loudly over the music.

“Yes, it was Father Ruffino.”

A woman with obviously dyed red hair, cropped short like a man’s, a low-scooped turquoise velvet top, dangly gold earrings, and a long chain with a glass medallion settled just above her ample breasts approached from behind and threw her arms around Damek. Her fingernails were long, lacquered with polish the color of wet maraschino cherries. She said something to him in a slurred voice, then eyed Dana suspiciously and continued speaking to Damek in an intimate voice, very close to his ear. The investigator nodded agreeably, smiling as if they were exchanging bar stories.

He turned to Dana. “Lenka Horácková?”

“Might be,” she replied. “Ask her how old this Lenka Horácková is.”

The woman had repositioned herself and was leaning into Damek now, her large breasts pushed up against him. Dana couldn’t tell if Damek was enjoying this or not. She’d have to give him credit for maintaining a professional demeanor. The woman said something as Damek raised his shoulders, took a step back. A weird techno rock now blasted from the jukebox.

Leaning in close, cupping his mouth with his hand, Damek said to Dana, “She tells me Lenka has a grown son, about twenty.”

“That would be just about right for Pavel Novák’s son,” she said, more to herself than Damek, who she wasn’t quite sure heard her anyway, as he was again speaking to the redhead. The woman held a beer glass, though it was near empty. She turned it upside down as if to test if there was any left. A dribble spilled on Damek, who didn’t seem fazed, who spoke to the woman in a friendly, reassuring way, as if he were comfortable here in the bar with this odd assortment of people.

“Ask her if the woman is married,” Dana said. “Ask her about Pavel Novák.”

The woman, now resting her breasts on the ledge of the bar, flirted with the bartender. Unlike Damek, who had looked at the woman’s face when he spoke to her, the bartender seemed to be focusing on the large orbs.

The bartender presented the redhead with another beer. She turned to Damek and smiled, then planted a little kiss on his forehead, leaving a red smear. Damek said something. The woman spilled another little dribble from the top of her full beer glass and then wiped it off Damek’s lapel. Making a little smacking sound with her lips, as if offering another kiss, she turned and teetered slowly toward a table in the far corner of the bar.

Damek glanced at Dana and said, “She does not know Novák, but she said the young man, Lenka’s son, he is a musician.”

“Did she give you a name?” Dana motioned with her hand, touching her own forehead where the redhead had left a smack mark on Damek’s. “You’ve got a little smudge,” she said, feeling almost embarrassed for the investigator.

“He goes by his mother’s name,” Damek said as he pulled a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. “It is Václav Horácek.”

“I thought her name was Horácková,” Dana said. She nodded, telling him he’d got the smudge. Damek replaced the handkerchief in his pocket.

“We do it differently here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Names,” he said.

“Oh, right.” She remembered now, the endings of Czech family names were different for male and female. Even if Pavel and Lenka had married, her name would not have been Novák. “His name’s Václav, after the famous playwright dissenter?” she asked. “The first president of the Czech Republic?”

“Possibly. Again, a common name.”

“Someone involved in the revolution might have chosen this name in his honor.”

Damek slid some bills onto the bar and motioned a thank-you to the bartender, who had moved down to the far side of the counter. The man saluted with one hand as he served something in a whiskey glass to a fellow wearing a cowboy hat and a bolo tie.

Just as they were about to step out, the redheaded woman approached, took Dal’s arm, and slurred something into his ear.

They were out on the street before Damek explained. “The woman told me her friend knows of this Lenka who once performed at the Divadlo Archa. He believes she no longer . . . how to say . . . no longer engaged in a profession.”

“Unemployed?”

He shook his head. “Retired,” he said after a moment.

Young retirement, Dana thought.

“Now I have the name,” Damek said, “perhaps I will be able to gather information.”

“Like an address?”

“It is possible.” They walked without words as Dana considered if she should press on the issue of the ladder, when he said, “Why did you ask about the ladder?”

She told him what she and Borelli had discovered and shared her thought that Father Ruffino had moved the ladder after Sister Claire’s death. He didn’t respond, just listened as they approached the car.

“I find this most difficult to believe,” he finally said. He shook his head.

She could tell he was considering this as he opened the passenger side for her. She guessed she was riding shotgun, not the backseat where he might put a prisoner.

“Father Ruffino is a kind, spiritual man,” Damek said as he started the car. “The kindest, the most godly man I have known.”

Borelli was right, Dana thought. This was personal. Investigator Damek had a very personal connection to Father Ruffino. Had this in some way compromised his investigation? Like Borelli, Dana thought; these two men believed anything and everything the priest told them, causing them to overlook what was so obvious to Dana: Father Ruffino was involved. She pictured Caroline, her fearful glances up toward the priest on the altar. Then she thought of how kindly the priest had spoken to Dana herself as she sat waiting.

“You were acquainted with Sister Claire?” Damek asked.

“No, I didn’t . . .” Dana hesitated, questioning whether she should tell him about what she’d discovered at the convent, her thoughts about how someone else might have gained access to the church and Infant’s altar box by taking the convent’s keys. “No. I didn’t know Sister Claire. Did you?”

“But, you
were
at the convent?” he asked.

Had he followed her to the convent? she wondered. She thought of the CD she’d taken from Caroline’s room. Damek knew about the CD. He’d mentioned it as they sat with coffee earlier in the evening. Dana glanced at his dashboard and then, without bothering to ask, she hit play on the CD player. He made no attempt to stop her, but forwarded to the tract she instantly recognized as “Laterna Magika,” the song she’d listened to just hours before at her hotel. She still had no idea what the lyrics meant. She wondered if this was his CD or hers. She guessed hers—Sister Agnes’s—but made no accusations.

When the song came to the second refrain, he translated: