Jana stood, her muscles anesthetized by the cold, her knees stiff. She began to beat her body with her clenched fists, trying to force the return of circulation. She had given up stamping her feet; they were numb to the bone.
She felt the cold more these days than when she was younger. “Put all the papers together, then leave them on my desk.”
“We have to give them to the coroner.”
“He can wait. I can’t.”
“It’s a simple case, with just a body or two more than usual. Seven people. Drunk. Driving too fast. Ice. Blam!! They are all dead.”
“There is too much ‘blam!’ here.”
He stood. “We’ve both seen it before.”
Jana noticed he had risen without much effort, which made her more irritated. The energy and recovery power of youth is indeed wasted on the young, but particularly on the young and stupid. “Tell me, why the fire?”
“Cars catch fire.”
“Why such a long-lasting blaze?” She pointed at the still-burning car. One of the traffic police was unsuccessfully trying to douse the flames with a hand-held extinguisher. The flames would not die. The cop finally threw the empty extinguisher into the dark.
“Make a note,” Jana murmured, with a half smile at the cop’s frustration. “The officer will have to pay for the extinguisher.” She hadn’t really meant it, but Seges scribbled furiously in his notebook.
Jana looked in the direction of the mountains. “I think it will be light soon. Hopefully it will warm this goddamned place up a little.” She started toward her car, then stopped, sniffing the air. “Smell,” she commanded Seges. “Eyes, ears, nose, the senses. That’s your main toolkit. Learn to use them.” She inhaled in an exaggerated manner. “You can smell it. Gasoline from the car but also
not
gasoline. Something else. Get one of the arson people on it.”
A fire truck finally arrived. Everything is late in Slovakia; even the men climbing off the truck to douse the blazing vehicle seemed to realize it. They were backseat spectators in this drama. No need for haste, their movements through the snow took on an exaggerated slowness. It was like an odd, primitive dance to the elements, the fire personnel ringing the blazing pieces of the vehicle with their equipment, priapic hoses slowly coming erect, finally spraying their juices over the remnants of a death sacrifice.
Jana watched, noting a salient fact: Even when they finally started to spray the vehicle with a chemical retardant, the flames seemed to resist, insisting on their angry prerogative of burning whatever substance was fueling them. Someone had wanted to make sure this car burned.
When the flames finally died, she walked to her car.
Seges eyed her as she left, nesting his hands under his armpits, trying to warm them back to life. She was like all the rest of his supervisors had been: Short on trust, she ignored his good qualities. Matinova was going to be looking over his shoulder. All she would do with his life as an officer would be to make more work for him.
Chapter 2
T
he man in whiteface, wearing an imitation Austrian army uniform circa 1800, stood on a small wooden box in the middle of the main square of Old Town, Bratislava. Except for the few passersby, the empty space, with its wind-driven, drifting veils of snow, looked gloomier than it generally did, even in winter. The statue of the armed knight looming over the fountain had been taken down and stored for the winter; the fountain itself had been covered over to prevent ice from forming inside, expanding and then splitting the stone.
The corpse-like leafless trees dotted through the square gave it an air of deep melancholy which even afflicted the clown figure performing on the box. Well, clowns had never made Jana laugh. Too sad or too scary. They had made her dislike going to the circus when she was a child.
Off to the side, Jana had been watching the man for some time, marveling that he was continuing his act even in this miserably cold weather, his only reward the rare coin that a pedestrian threw into his alms box out of pity.
The man was working with two cats, and he had them doing remarkable things, tricks that any household cat lover would tell you were impossible to teach.
He would stand the cats straight up, and they would remain immobile. He’d drape them around his neck, first one and then both of them, like a feather boa. Or he would sit them erect, face to face, and they would hug each other. He would extend his arms out from his body with a cat lying along each arm, and the felines remained absolutely immobile, neither giving any sign of discomfort or fear, each looking like a frozen piece of statuary shaped like a cat.
Jana finally stepped out of the doorway and walked over to the man, stopping in front of him. She looked up at him for a few seconds. The street busker gave her only the slightest indication that he’d seen her, continuing on with his act.
“Come off the box, Jurai,” she finally ordered. “You need to be told something.”
“I’m working,” he hissed at her. “This is what keeps me in bread
. I
don’t get paid by the state.” He draped the cats like bracelets around both wrists, then transferred both to a single wrist as a double bracelet of cats, then again as a double necklace around his neck.
“Very good, Jurai. Now come down or I will have to kick the box out from under you and bring you down.”
Reluctantly, this time mumbling to his cats, the man climbed off his makeshift stage. “All police are the bearers of bad news. It’s a disease they have.” He sat the cats where he had stood; neither moved from where it was placed. “Patience. I will be back in a moment.” He turned to Jana again. “What is it now?”
Jana stared at his face. Up close, even through the white makeup, she could see the three-inch scar on his forehead. She knew where to look. She had put it there.
The clown watched her eyes, knew she was studying it, and involuntarily touched it with his fingertips. “You marked me for life.”
“Blame it on the communists.”
“You were the one who hit me.”
“You were stealing from the mail. The communists would have charged you with an act against the state if I had arrested you. You would have gone to prison and they would have thrown away the key. Prison for a man with a young family to support was the greater of two evils, so I hit you.”
“You should have let me go.”
“Then they would have punished me.”
“They would never have found out.”
“You would have been caught eventually by another police officer, you would have sought a favor, a lesser sentence to save yourself, and you would have told them about my letting you go. Not something the communists would have liked. So the deeds, present and future, required punishment. Your wife thanked me.”
“She was stupid.”
“You were the stupid one. She doesn’t have a scar on her forehead.”
“She’s dead.”
“I heard. Last year. You were not at the funeral.”
“We were separated.”
“Now your daughter is dead.”
The clown swayed just a little as if the wind had picked up and changed direction.
“You saw her dead?” He had to make sure. “No question it was her?
“No question.”
“How?”
“A car wreck.”
He stared at her as if waiting for the next blow. “You keep giving me scars.” He thought for a minute. “You have more?”
“She was working as a prostitute. Who was her pimp?”
He shook his head, then shrugged his shoulders to indicate he did not know. “I haven’t seen her in a year. She would not work. She would not go to school. She left.”
“You threw her out.”
“Maybe.”
Jana held up the passport she had taken from Seges, opening it to the photograph of the dead man, holding it up in front of the clown’s face.
“Who is this man?”
He looked at the photograph, trying to decide what to disclose. “Are you putting me in danger if I tell you?”
“Clown, your daughter is dead. Who is the man?”
He considered his options, finally deciding that the present danger of not giving her the information outweighed any future threat.
“I think he owned the wine bar across from the English pub.”
“You saw him with your daughter?”
“Never. He asked me to do my cat act for him at his bar one evening.”
“Who was there?”
“No one I’d seen before or since.”
“Slovaks?”
“All foreigners.”
“I am sorry about your daughter.” She put the passport in her pocket. “I remember her when she was little.”
“She had become a whore.”
“And you were a thief.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “She slept with anyone who paid her. A whore.”
“At least she gave something in return for what she got.” Jana looked down at the cats. “Show me one of them.” The clown hesitated. “I will leave you with another scar if you don’t show me the cat.”
Reluctantly he bent down and picked up one of the cats, handing it to her. The cat did not move. Jana examined its face, petting the red and brown patchwork head.
“Poor thing. Poor little thing.” She stepped closer to the clown, almost nose to nose. “It’s blind. They’re both blind, aren’t they?”
“So they’re blind. As long as the spectators are blind as well, who cares? They’re just cats.”
“They can’t see, so they must stay where they are, clinging to you, to each other, hoping you won’t drop them.”
“I feed them. They would be dead otherwise.”
“How did you blind them? A pin in each eye when they were kittens? Just half a centimeter into each pupil, right? Blinded as children so they would not know any better.” She paused. “They are your children so you can do what you want with them, right? Did you sell your daughter to the Albanian?
“I am an honest man.”
“Never.”
Jana reached over to the platform and scooped up the other cat, then walked away carrying them both.
“Where are you taking my cats? They belong to me. I own them.”
Jana kept on walking.
“You are taking my livelihood away.”
“Maybe you don’t deserve to live.”
She continued out of the square. The passersby wondered why a police officer was carrying a pair of cats.
Chapter 3
B
ack when the communists were in charge, there was no Easter. No Christmas. Religious holidays ceased to exist; people could not celebrate. The communists delighted in denying reality, substituting mirages, false celebrations created specifically for what they perceived was the state’s benefit. All false; everything distorted. Bureaucrats ruled the world. And, for the common man who had to eat, he who did not steal from the state stole bread from his family. That was the only rule the people could follow to fight back.
Communist Slovakia. A strange time and place for her to decide to become a police officer. Then again, maybe not. In a land of distorted values, it at least offered some certainty as long as you stayed away from the political side. She had tried, and look where it had gotten her, even under the new rule of winner-take-all capitalism: She was just another gray bureaucrat in a cubbyhole.
Jana looked around her office: dull, drab, paint peeling, an old cabinet for police procedural publications, a few never-framed dusty pictures on the walls depicting bucolic scenes. She had hoped they would add freshness and light. But as soon as she put them up, they had taken on the characteristics of the room, becoming overcast themselves.
The two blind cats she had rescued from Jurai were curled up in a corner on two-week-old newspapers she had culled from the visitor’s room. Jana had found a small bowl for water and shredded some lunch meat, laying it out on a cracked saucer from the coffee room. The cats had sniffed at the meat, one of them taking a small bite; then both of them had gone to sleep. They had not made a sound during the whole time she had them. When cats are blind, she asked herself, are they also deprived of the ability to make sounds?
No. Blindness has nothing to do with speech. To be blind was to simply not see. Unseeing and unseen. You looked in a mirror and still saw nothing of yourself, of your future. When she had first met Daniel, she had been blind.
Daniel had also been sightless. But his lack of sight had been assumed as part of a role he was playing at the National Theatre. He was performing Hamlet, the youngest Hamlet in the history of that theater, and in his interpretation of the tragic prince he was playing the role as if the young Dane were blind, a boy turning into a man who makes his life mistakes not only because of his own emotional incapacities but due to the actual failure of his sight. And it had worked. Oh, how it had worked.
That night, everyone in the theater felt for that slender, dark-haired man on the stage. His limpid brown eyes showed such pain and anguish, even though the eyes were unseeing.
How incredible he was when he moved; how sensual he was when he touched things; how he walked from object to object on the stage supposedly not knowing they were there, yet reaching every destination using an actor’s artifice that was completely accepted by the audience. Dano, as she later called him, was even believable in the play’s denouement, the dueling scene, somehow conveying that he could hear the blade coming at him, parry, than slash back at his unseen opponent. And, finally, when he was about to succumb to the poison administered by the scratch of his opponent’s blade, every man in the audience believed they had seen the ultimate ennobled prince, and every woman was dismayed that she was about to lose her heroic lover before their romance had reached its fulfillment.
In his penultimate dying speech, to the last person in the last row, everyone in that audience died a little.
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain