Field of Death

by Graham Brack

  FIELD OF DEATH

  Josef Slonský

  Book Four

  Graham Brack

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  ALSO BY GRAHAM BRACK

  Chapter 1

  Josef Slonský sat on the edge of his bed and had a well-deserved scratch to greet the day. He could hear distant church bells greeting Liberation Day on which much of the population would enjoy a day off. For the police, there was no such luxury, because the massed crowds in the centre of Prague meant that a lot of purses and wallets would be liberated too.

  8th May, and what a year it had been so far. He could not remember such a concatenation of misery. It started just before Christmas, when Captain Lukas returned from his sick leave minus his misbehaving gall bladder and looking as if he had been given his big brother’s uniform.

  ‘You’ve lost weight, sir,’ Slonský had remarked, keen to prove that his observational powers were undiminished.

  ‘Thank you for noticing. About ten kilos, I believe. But since I’m retiring in six months it’s hardly worth getting a new uniform.’

  ‘At least buy a new belt, sir, or I’ll be having to arrest you for indecent exposure.’

  ‘Yes, they are a bit slack, aren’t they? Perhaps a new uniform would be best. I must say, I feel better for losing the weight. I hadn’t realised what a difference ten kilos could make. It wouldn’t do you any harm to lose a few kilos, Slonský.’

  By New Year, Slonský was suspecting a conspiracy. His ex-wife Věra had come round with a book on exercise for the older man. It had some ludicrous title like Stop Your Belling Sagging which provoked him to check a few bookshops for retaliatory offerings like Get Rid Of Droopy Breasts but there was nothing suitable. She had also given him a pullover for Christmas, which she had noted was ‘a bit snug’ when he tried it on.

  ‘You must have put some weight on,’ she had said. ‘I’m sure you were a 102 chest when we were together.’

  ‘That was thirty-seven years ago, woman,’ Slonský had growled, but felt obliged to soften his tone when he realised that he had not bought her a present in return. The following day he showed up at her flat with a bunch of flowers, having belatedly screwed up the little “In Loving Memory” card that he had not noticed in the store.

  Then February brought one of those moments he thought he would never see. Arriving in a bar to see his old friend Valentin he found the journalist sitting with a glass of clear liquid topped with a slice of lemon.

  ‘What’s that?’ Slonský asked. ‘Vodka?’

  ‘Water.’

  ‘Water? Hadn’t they finished washing the glass out when you ordered?’

  ‘No, I ordered a water. Sparkling, of course. I don’t want to look like a wimp.’

  ‘Water? You’re drinking water? Don’t you realise fish pee in that?’

  ‘I’m detoxing.’

  Slonský goggled. ‘Detoxing? Is there any point at your age?’

  ‘I’ve been having a bit of liver trouble and the doctor told me to detox. So I have five days of drinking as usual and two with no alcohol at all. Or maybe it’s supposed to be the other way round. Anyway, this is one of my two days. And I don’t eat any meat on those days either. He told me I need five portions of vegetables a day too.’

  Slonský felt that everything he believed in had been overturned. This was simply inconceivable. He and Valentin had been drinking together since they were eleven.

  ‘Hops are a vegetable. So is barley, so that’s two. And if you have a litre of beer, that’s two portions of each. Get yourself a baked potato and the job’s done.’

  ‘They mean green stuff. You know, spinach, broccoli, cabbage.’

  It had barely crossed Slonský’s mind that you might eat cabbage without pickling it first. Of course, he had heard of vegetarians, but he had never actually met one before. It seemed unpatriotic to him.

  Slonský was so nonplussed he missed his mouth with his first slurp and tipped his beer down his tie.

  The final insult came from Captain Lukas. There they were, chewing the fat like old colleagues do, when suddenly he came out with it.

  ‘Why don’t you come to the gym with me?’

  ‘The gym? Why?’

  ‘To get fit. To tell the truth, I have trouble keeping my weight down. An hour on the machines there helps. Do you know, I haven’t felt so good in years! I don’t know why I didn’t do it before.’

  Slonský had half a mind to walk out and send for a psychiatric report on Lukas. You heard about this sort of thing when men got older. They lost their grip.

  ‘You know, Slonský, you could do with getting fitter. I’ve watched you climbing those stairs. I don’t want to hand over to you and find you’ve had a coronary with the added stress of running the department.’

  Slonský’s original plan on succeeding Lukas, if it happened, which was by no means certain, had been to give the work to Kristýna Peiperová, but now that the Director of Criminal Police had asked for her to be seconded to him as his new Personal Assistant for a year from 1st June, exactly one month before Lukas left, that was no longer going to be possible.

  As part of the application process for Lukas’ job Slonský had to submit to a medical, so on 7th May he found himself standing in the doctor’s office without a shirt on as the doctor clapped the cold end of his stethoscope to assorted parts of his back and instructed him to breathe deeply.

  ‘According to your weight, Slonský, you should be thirty-eight centimetres taller.’

  ‘Not much I can do about that, doctor.’

  ‘No, so you’d better lose the weight. Around twenty kilos should do it.’

  ‘Twenty? Captain Lukas thought ten.’

  ‘Is he medically qualified? I thought not. No, ten kilos would barely scratch the surface. I doubt people would even notice.’

  This came as a shock to Slonský, who thought that losing ten kilos would reduce him to such a skeletal state that passers-by in the street would offer him charity so he could get a decent meal.

  ‘Right, on the treadmill. The target is a kilometre in under nine minutes.’

  Slonský took his mobile phone out.

  ‘What are you doing, Slonský?’

  ‘If I have to run a kilometre, I ring for a taxi,’ came the reply.

  ‘I’ll start it on a slow setting, then speed it up as you get your rhythm.’

  Slonský began at a fast walk, but was soon beginning to tire.

  ‘Halfway?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘Three hundred and ten metres. I’ll tell you when you’re halfway, but you’re going to have to speed up a bit, or you won’t pass the test.’

  ‘And then?’ gasped Slonský.

  ‘If you don’t pass, you’re not fit for service. You’d get a second test and then retirement on medical grounds.’

  Slonský was so astonished that he stopped walking. Sadly the treadmill did not stop, so his feet were carried to the end of the rollers and he was catapulted backwards onto the floor. By great good fortune he banged his head.

  ‘It’s best if we scrub this test for today,’ said the doctor. ‘Come back on the day after the holiday and we’ll do it again.’

  ‘Peiperová, I can always rely on you to tell me what you think, can’t I?’

  ‘I hope so, sir.�
��

  ‘Good. Do you think I’m overweight?’

  ‘Do you want a truthful answer or a polite one, sir?’

  ‘Not you too. You Jezebel. Or do I mean Delilah?’

  ‘You could be slimmer, sir. It would do you some good. We’d all like you to be around for a long time to come, so it’s good that you even asked the question.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘It shows you’re mentally prepared to contemplate change, sir. It’s the first step towards self-improvement.’

  Slonský wondered where she had heard this guff. Unfortunately Peiperová interpreted the silent movings of his mouth as evidence of strong emotion, which was right in a way, but the emotion was anger. Feeling that he needed some reinforcement as validation of the change he was contemplating, she knew what was expected of her. She grabbed both his hands, made strong eye contact, and maintained a confident tone of voice.

  ‘You can do it, sir. I have faith in you.’

  So after that, he had no choice. Peiperová expected it of him.

  The next day, as Slonský approached the canteen counter, Dumpy Anna lifted the cover off the pastries.

  ‘I can’t,’ Slonský said miserably. ‘I have to lose weight. How am I going to do that?’

  Anna indicated her own ample physique. ‘Do I look like the sort of person who gives dietary advice?’ she said. ‘But I’ll tell you this. You don’t have to give up sausage.’

  Slonský’s mood lightened at once. ‘I don’t?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘In moderation, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Slonský, who thought that five sausages was a moderate portion.

  ‘The thing is,’ she continued, ‘it’s all in the cooking. Meat doesn’t have many calories compared with sticky things. It’s fat that does it. But if you have your sausage grilled, all the fat runs out, doesn’t it? So what’s left is basically fat-free.’

  ‘Fat-free sausages? Who’d have thought it?’

  Slonský had the sort of smile he had not exhibited since he first discovered that a nice old man brought presents around Christmas.

  ‘Just cut down on bread and pastries. And every time you have a beer, have a glass of water. You’ll be skipping around like a mountain goat in no time.’

  Thus it was that Slonský woke on Liberation Day or, as he chose to think of it, the first day of the rest of his life. This was not an enticing prospect, and he had stupidly agreed to go to the gym with Captain Lukas. There was not even time to have breakfast, so he threw some old sports clothes in a carrier bag and headed for the police gymnasium.

  The first surprise was that Lukas was sitting down. Nobody had mentioned that you could get fit sitting down, but Lukas had one leg on either side of a narrow bench and he was yanking on a couple of handles by his shoulders, swinging them in front of him then letting them recoil. I could do that, thought Slonský, but none of those machines was free. There was a rowing machine and, having once rowed as a teenager, he thought he would give that a go. As he recalled, it was the drag of the water on the blade of the oar that made it difficult, but there was no water in the gym so it should be very straightforward.

  Slonský perched himself on the seat, bent his knees, and pulled. The resistance of the bar was a surprise to him, and he banged his thigh against the steel strut, which was rather painful. Refusing to give in to a machine, he tried a few more times, and finally managed to put some strokes together. By then Lukas had joined him.

  ‘Good work, Slonský. Believe me, you’ll feel the benefit. I’m just going to have a steam bath, but you carry on. Ten minutes of this will be an excellent start.’

  As Lukas padded off, Slonský reflected that ten minutes more of this would be a damn miracle. He gritted his teeth and tried to get into some sort of rhythm, because he thought he vaguely remembered once hearing that a steady rhythm made exercise easier.

  His attention was caught by a young policewoman who was swinging back and forth on the asymmetric bars. She bounced back off the lower bar, elevated herself to an inverted vertical position, pivoted through a hundred and eighty degrees along the upper bar and dropped back to the lower bar which smacked into her hips, though she showed no sign of wincing, so Slonský did it for her.

  ‘Nice, eh?’

  The owner of the voice was standing behind Slonský. The uniform tracksuit betrayed him as a member of the gym staff, though actually the way his singlet clung to his abdominal muscles would have been a giveaway.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you here before,’ he said. ‘Čada, Ladislav.’

  ‘Slonský, Josef. No, I’m a newbie. My first visit, and possibly my last.’

  ‘Have you been sent?’

  ‘No, but I’ve got my medical tomorrow and apparently I’m overweight and undertall. Plus I can’t run a kilometre in nine minutes, though I reckon that test can’t be applied uniformly because there are plenty of people in this building who couldn’t do that.’

  Čada laughed. ‘It’s a weed-out test. They use it as a reason to get rid of people. It’s only a recommendation anyway. Your line manager can ignore it if you’re not one of the Special Operations team. And I don’t think you are, somehow.’

  ‘No, nor am I contemplating a career change. Well, you’ve cheered me up a bit.’

  ‘That’s not a reason for not exercising. Hang on, you haven’t got that set up for someone of your height. Let me just adjust it a bit.’

  Čada tweaked a couple of wheels on the side and flicked a little lever. ‘There — try that.’

  Slonský rowed again, and found it much easier. ‘Thanks, that’s a lot better,’ he said.

  Čada looked around. The little policewoman had finished her routine and headed for the changing rooms. He dropped his voice conspiratorially. ‘We can do something about the weight too.’

  He fished in the first aid pouch clipped to his waistband and produced a strip of tablets. ‘It’s an old weightlifter’s trick. You take one of these a couple of hours before you weigh in, pee like a waterfall and suddenly you’re two or three kilos lighter. After the weigh-in you top up with a couple of glasses of water and you’re back to normal in no time. Strictly temporary, of course, but it does the job.’

  Valentin was perusing a newspaper when Slonský found him a few hours later.

  ‘I thought Tuesday was one of your alcohol-free days,’ he said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘But it’s Tuesday today and unless I’m very much mistaken that’s a glass of beer in front of you.’

  ‘It’s Liberation Day, Slonský. It would be unpatriotic not to have a drink today.’

  ‘A point well made. I’ll join you, just to show Czech solidarity.’

  ‘A word to the wise. They’ve got a promotion on for one of those beers with juice mixed in. Not a good idea.’

  ‘Do I look like the sort of person who drinks cocktails?’

  ‘No, but they might take advantage of your good nature.’

  ‘Just as well I don’t have one, then.’

  The waiter brought a couple of beers, since Valentin thought it would be unfriendly not to accept a drink from an old mate, especially on Liberation Day.

  ‘You look like you’re enjoying that,’ the reporter remarked.

  ‘Last one for a while. I’ve got to get myself in trim or I risk losing my job.’

  ‘How’s that then?’ asked Valentin, and Slonský was pleased to note a hint of genuine concern in his voice.

  ‘I’ve got to have a medical before I get promoted and if I don’t pass it, they send a recommendation to my boss to give me the heave on medical grounds.’

  Valentin took a long pull from his glass and swilled it around his mouth in thought.

  ‘No problem,’ he announced. ‘By the time the report gets to Lukas’ desk he’ll have retired and you’ll be in charge. You’ll be your own manager, and you can tell them to shove their report where the sun won’t fade the ink.’

  Slonský managed a weak smile. ‘Good
try, old friend, but I think in those circumstances they’d send it to the Director. And while I’m reasonably confident that he wants to keep me, and I wouldn’t want to upset him, there’s a much more serious problem.’

  ‘Oh, and that is?’

  ‘Peiperová says she knows I’ll lose the weight. She has faith in me, she says. I can’t let her down, Valentin. She looks up to me.’

  ‘Of course she does. You’re taller than she is.’

  ‘I meant figuratively looking up to me. And she leaves at the end of the month, so I’ve got to do some crash dieting.’

  ‘How much have you got to lose?’

  ‘The doctor says twenty kilos.’

  ‘Twenty kilos? Dear God, man, you’ll be pure skin and bone. You’ll have to wear lead pants or the wind will blow you over.’

  ‘Nevertheless…’

  ‘When were you last twenty kilos lighter?’

  Slonský thought for a while. ‘I think I was about thirteen. I’ve always been inclined to the fuller figure, you see.’

  ‘I know. I was around, remember?’

  ‘Well, I’ll just have to do the best I can. But a kilo a day will be a tall order.’

  Slonský fingered the little strip of tablets in his pocket. They had better be as good as Čada claimed.

  Chapter 2

  The morning of day two of the rest of Slonský’s life dawned, and his stomach was rumbling from the moment he opened his eyes. Sergeant Pavel Mucha had told him that a hot drink would fill his innards, so he gulped down two mugs of coffee and then took out the tablets. Reasoning that if the standard dose was one, he probably needed two, he swallowed them with the last of his drink and headed off to the doctor’s office for his assessment.

  He had not long been in the waiting room when he felt an urgent need to rid himself of the coffee, and was pleasantly surprised to see the volume that he produced. It seemed that, if anything, Čada had understated the effectiveness of these little white tablets. Assuming that they would probably wear off once they had produced an effect, he decided to take another couple while he waited.