The Josef Slonský Box Set

by Graham Brack

  Today’s journey was quite simple. Take the number 18 tram from Palouček to Národní třída, then switch to the number 17 for the rest of the journey, with a short walk at the end. Holoubek hoped that a ticket inspector might ask for proof that he was over seventy. It had happened to him once, and he had enjoyed being able to prove he was over age. He must look younger for that to happen, he thought. Admittedly it was about fifteen years ago, but it was the principle of the thing.

  The principle of the thing. Exactly the reason that he was on the tram in the first place. His son had told him to let it drop, but Holoubek could not. It was the principle of the thing — but then he couldn’t expect his son to understand that. He was one of the suede booted, leather jacketed, long haired near hippy generation. Authentic. That was the word he kept using. He said it was important to live an authentic life, whatever one of those was. So far as Holoubek was concerned, you were either alive or you weren’t, and if you were alive, you had a life to lead, and you’d better get on with it and stop moaning. After all, there were plenty of people in the cemeteries who would tell you that you had nothing to complain about. One of them had been telling him that for a few months now. He had a complaint to make, and he needed Holoubek to make it because he could not do it himself, having been dead all these years.

  Holoubek had searched a lot of rooms in his time, and there was not much you could tell him about hidey-holes. He was known for the rigour of his searches, and this despite having spent much of his career in the force at a time when every policeman had a lot of practice in searching. Barely a day went by when they were not turning someone’s flat over looking for nothing in particular. As a result, Holoubek had learned a great deal about concealment. He could find a hollow wall, a concealed panel, a false skirting board, a package in a drain pipe or a recently moved floorboard that might be hiding something of importance.

  However, in 1967, someone had almost got the better of him. They had been rummaging through a flat in the Old Town where they were absolutely certain there ought to be a roll of film, but despite a fairly thorough demolition of the place it had not come to light. Holoubek was dogged — some would say pathologically stubborn — so when the others had given up, he had indulged in his favourite technique of sitting in the middle of the floor, slowly scanning the room. In this way he had come to the conclusion that the film was not under or behind something, but inside it, and after some nifty work with his penknife he had found it inside the works of the record player.

  He kept this information to himself, because he wanted to have somewhere private of his own in case the tables were ever turned, and over the intervening decades he had come up with a number of cunning places to keep items of various sizes and types.

  The casual visitor to Holoubek’s flat would have been impressed with its general tidiness, and perhaps felt a little sad that it was still mired in the seventies or eighties. There was, for example, an old-fashioned television in the corner. Holoubek could have afforded a flat screen model, but it would have had one major drawback. His confidential notes would not have snuggled inside the casing, taped to the underside of the top surface without causing a fire risk. Thus, before catching the tram, Holoubek had carefully unscrewed the back of the television, having disconnected it from the mains some time before, and had extracted a narrow manila envelope which was nestled in his inside jacket pocket. As he sat on the number 17 tram he rubbed his upper arm against the pocket to check the envelope was still there. Only a fool puts his hand in to check; you never know who might be watching. Satisfied that it was safe, he relaxed and enjoyed the journey.

  Chapter 2

  Captain Josef Lukas flicked through the folder one more time. Damn! There appeared to be only one way to do this. Damn! It was going to be an awkward interview, but that was what management was for. A man could not chicken out of his responsibilities.

  Slonský knocked on the door, a redundant gesture since he had opened it first and begun to walk in.

  ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Slonský. You’d better sit down.’

  Slonský obeyed, and adopted a facial expression of extreme innocence, as if he could not possibly have any inkling of what was coming.

  ‘It’s about retirement, Slonský.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir. We’ll miss you.’

  ‘Not my retirement, Slonský. Yours!’

  When he had been small, Slonský had owned a dog of indeterminate breed whose response to the word ‘bath’ was one of profound anxiety morphing into abject terror. There was some irony in the fact that the word ‘retirement’ had the same effect on Slonský. He knew, of course, that it must come. He also knew that he was approaching the age when it would be laid before him, but he had hoped that if he kept solving crime they would let him stay on. He did not want to retire, because he had nothing else to do. He did not play dominoes and he had no interest in daytime television — or evening television, for that matter. He loathed gardening and his pension would not allow him to spend all day in a bar.

  Lukas wore an expression of fatherly concern.

  ‘Have you given any thought to retirement, Slonský?’

  A small fire of rebellion kindled in Slonský’s chest. If he was being put out to grass, he was damned if they were going to do that to him. He would preserve his self-respect by deciding that it was his choice.

  ‘I can’t deny it would be good to have some time to myself, sir.’

  Lukas threw the folder on the desk. This was not going well.

  ‘Look here, Josef. The thing is, with Němec retiring and the reorganisation going on, we can ill afford to lose you both in such a short time. I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to be able to let you go. You’ll have to stay on a while longer.’

  Slonský’s heart turned a few flips of delight, though he tried to conceal his pleasure.

  ‘As you wish, sir. I’m at the Department’s disposal, as ever.’

  He closed the door behind him and resisted the temptation to leap up and click his heels until he could not be seen through the frosted glass, behind which Lukas was grinning. He knew all along that Slonský was dreading retirement but it was so rare that he was able to get one over his lieutenant that he had been unable to resist. The puppet-master had had his own strings pulled.

  ‘You’re looking pleased,’ said Officer Jan Navrátil, glancing up from a large printout of crime statistics.

  ‘And I have reason to be, lad. I have been assured that I will be around to complete your education. The powers that be — or, more accurately, the power that is — has decided that I am indispensable to the smooth running of this department. This calls for a celebration. As soon as you’ve finished whatever it is you’re doing, we’ll decamp to a nearby hostelry and get our consciousness obliterated on Plzeň’s finest product.’

  ‘That’ll be a while,’ said Navrátil. ‘I’m supposed to be compiling burglary statistics from the station returns for the whole of Prague.’

  ‘Show me,’ Slonský replied.

  Navrátil handed over the binder of printout.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Slonský began, ‘but this looks like a collation of burglary statistics to me. The very thing someone has asked you to put together. Allow me to point out that you already have one here.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not right. Some of the stations misclassify crimes, and others don’t use the online system properly. If you believed these figures you’d think that there was no burglary at all in Vysočany.’

  ‘There probably isn’t,’ Slonský agreed. ‘There’ll be damn all worth nicking there.’

  ‘I’ve been at it for two hours and it’s no better.’

  Slonský rested his hand on Navrátil’s shoulder.

  ‘Courage, lad! Fortitude! Nil desperandum but trust in Slonský. Who asked you to do this?’

  ‘Captain Lukas.’

  ‘And how does he know they’re wrong?’

  ‘Because they alwa
ys are.’

  ‘But does he know what the right number is? Of course not, or he wouldn’t need you to work it out. Thus, it seems to me, whatever set of numbers you give him, he will accept as accurate so long as they’re different to the ones he had before. Just make them up, lad.’

  Navrátil was shocked. ‘You can’t just make up crime statistics.’

  ‘Of course you can. We’ve done it for years. Not to mention economic statistics, voting figures, almost any set of numbers you care to name.’

  ‘But we need accurate crime statistics.’

  Slonský considered this novel argument for a few moments.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, because … if we don’t know where the crime is, how will we know where to concentrate our resources?’

  ‘Crime is everywhere, therefore the police have to be everywhere. And we don’t have any spare ones now so knowing we need more doesn’t help us. Let me also draw your attention to the great flaw in that argument. Criminals tend to go where there aren’t policemen. Thus, if we concentrate them in one area, the crime moves to a different one and we’re worse off than if we’d left things alone. The only people who want to know where the crime is are the criminals. No point burgling an estate that has been cleaned out already. And accurate crime figures, which I remind you we now publish on the internet for any Tom, Dick or Harry to see, just make for economy of effort for the criminal. We’re doing their research for them, Navrátil. At least, I’m not; you are.’

  ‘That’s so cynical. Our job is to prevent crime.’

  ‘And how many crimes have you prevented sitting on your backside in this office all afternoon? Whereas if you and I had been tucking into a well-earned sausage down the road, we might have overheard criminals plotting a crime. They don’t come into police stations to do it, Navrátil. Except the ones who are policemen themselves, of course.’

  Navrátil chewed the end of his pencil while he tried to come to terms with the enormity of the course Slonský was setting before him.

  ‘It’s no good, sir. Making up figures is just plain wrong.’

  Slonský leaned over Navrátil’s shoulder.

  ‘Not making them up is wasting time.’

  A set of footsteps could be heard in the corridor. Slonský looked up in time to see a figure bearing a tray walking past the door.

  ‘Hey, Matějka!’ Slonský called.

  The figure stopped walking and reversed one step. He did not attempt to turn, but nudged the door open with the back of his shoulder and turned his head to look through the resultant gap.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will you answer a question for me?’

  ‘Depends what it is.’

  ‘Do you swear that the answer you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?’

  ‘Not till I know the question.’

  ‘Fair enough. When did you last look at the crime statistics?’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ asked Matějka.

  ‘Aha! I rest my case, Navrátil. It doesn’t matter what the statistics say because nobody looks at them. Thanks, Matějka. By the way, Martinů just ran off with your ham sandwich.’

  ‘How could … Oi! Martinů! I want a word with you.’

  Navrátil still looked uneasy.

  ‘Go on, lad,’ said Slonský in his most seductive voice. ‘Make one up. You know you want to.’

  ‘I don’t! I can’t!’

  ‘Of course you can. All it takes is a small movement of that little pencil of yours with the soggy top. Forty-five is a nice number. Let’s have forty-five of something. Forty-five housebreakings in Kbely — or perhaps forty-five car thefts in Libuš.’

  ‘Why not forty-five garrottings in Kunratice?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, boy. We’d have put a stop to that before now.’

  Navrátil pounced. ‘So if I made up a report of a garrotting in Kunratice, that would be shocking, but making up forty-five car thefts is acceptable?’

  ‘I didn’t say it was acceptable. I said it was accepted. You have a lot to learn about the traditional Czech approach to statistics, lad.’ Slonský sat down and stretched his legs across his desk. ‘Back in the old days — don’t roll your eyes like that, Navrátil, people will think you’re simple — we collected statistics on crime. Because we weren’t very good at policing, a lot of crime went unpunished. This damaged confidence in the police force but, more importantly, the public felt unsafe. How can you sleep if you think you may be murdered in your bed? We had three alternatives, Navrátil. We could get better at detecting crime — obviously a non-starter. We could pin the blame on a scapegoat and tell the public it was all sorted out. Scapegoats were plentiful and the government wrote the court reports so that worked quite well, all things considered. Then someone came up with the masterstroke, Plan C. Stop collecting statistics. Once we had as many murders as we could handle, we stopped collecting the data. If the bigwigs said we would have no more than ten murders in Brno, then we stopped counting once we got to ten. This improved public confidence in the police, because each year the number went down a bit. People felt safer. They were just as likely to be bludgeoned to death as before, but the point is they didn’t think they were.’

  ‘That’s scandalous,’ Navrátil protested.

  ‘No doubt. But it happened. You couldn’t collect a statistic without knowing why it was wanted. Look, hand me down that big book off the top of the cabinet beside you and I’ll show you what I mean.’

  Navrátil collected the dusty volume and brought it to Slonský, who riffled through the pages until he came to a table.

  ‘Ah, here we are, lad. This is a table showing the number of secret police informants in Czechoslovakia in 1950 and 1952. What’s the population of Prague?’

  ‘One and a quarter million.’

  ‘Population of Plzeň?’

  ‘I don’t know. A hundred and fifty thousand, maybe?’

  ‘We’ll go along with that. Odd, then, that in 1950 there were seventy-five informants in Prague but 1,135 in Plzeň, wouldn’t you say? Even odder, look at Ústí nad Labem. In 1950, there were forty-six informants, but just two years later there were over thirteen hundred. Now tell me, son, what do you think? Are those facts, or imaginative statistics?’

  ‘Imaginative? Don’t you mean imaginary?’

  An indulgent smile flickered across Slonský’s lips.

  ‘No, I mean what I say. Imaginative in the sense of creative. Imaginary statistics are something completely different. Imaginary statistics are the ones we used to make us look good.’

  Navrátil’s head was spinning. He grabbed his temples with both hands in a pointless effort to make the world stop.

  ‘Suppose your police district didn’t have its ten murders. People would think they’d probably happened, but you were too useless to discover them. So if you didn’t make your quota, you might invent an imaginary crime or two. This was a good thing, because our success rate on clearing up imaginary crime was nearly a hundred per cent. So, instead of reporting eight murders, of which we had cleared up two, we’d report ten murders of which we had solved four. See the power of statistics, Navrátil? With the stroke of a pen, we’d gone from a twenty-five per cent success rate to a forty per cent rate. The public were happy, we were happy, everyone was happy. They were simpler times then.’ Slonský emitted a nostalgic sigh. ‘I’m going to get us some coffee, Navrátil. By the time I come back I want that report finished so we can get on with some proper policing. How you do that is up to you.’

  The tap on his shoulder made Slonský jump.

  ‘Do you have to do that, Mucha? I nearly wet myself.’

  ‘That’s your age,’ explained the desk sergeant. ‘Sudden excitement and — whoosh!’

  ‘There’s no whoosh involved,’ replied Slonský. ‘I meant I almost spilled these coffees.’

  ‘Whose are those?’

  ‘One for me, one for Navrátil. His is the smaller one.’

  �
��Which one is that?’

  ‘I don’t know until I get them upstairs, do I? Depends how much I spill. Anyway, what do you want?’

  ‘There’s an old man at the desk asking for you.’

  ‘Why me? He doesn’t have a black cloak and a large scythe, does he?’

  ‘No, you’re safe there. He’s nearer to that than you are.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that.’

  Sergeant Pavel Mucha watched Slonský’s face closely for a reaction as he explained who was waiting. ‘It’s Holoubek. Remember him?’

  ‘Holoubek? Is he still alive?’

  ‘Well, he was when I came looking for you, but given the time it’s taken…’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. You’re the detective. I’m just a lowly desk sergeant.’

  ‘Were you around when he was here?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mucha. ‘Not at the desk then, but on the force.’

  ‘Do me a favour, then. I’ll fetch him upstairs if you get a third coffee and bring them up to my office.’

  Slonský forced the cups into Mucha’s hands and strode off along the corridor.

  ‘I’ll get one for myself, then, shall I?’ asked Mucha in a resentful tone.

  ‘If you like. You can pay for my two while you’re at it. I left my money in my coat.’

  Holoubek looked around as he sat in the chair Slonský offered him.

  ‘Could do with a lick of paint,’ he offered. He took a sip of coffee. ‘That’s no better either,’ he decided.