by Graham Brack
‘No papers? Tut, tut. Then we may have to send you home.’
The brunette translated. It appeared that this declaration met with general approval, and several girls ran to pack bags.
‘Our passports are taken by bad men,’ the brunette explained. ‘They keep them so we cannot go.’
‘Are you all Bosnian?’ Slonský asked. There was some shaking of heads that illustrated that a couple of Croat girls were there, and at least one Montenegrin. The doorman appeared behind them.
‘Your van’s here. Can I come too?’
‘Why? Are your papers out of order?’
‘No, but if I come I won’t have to explain why I let you in and didn’t call the boss.’
Slonský lifted his hat and scratched his head in perplexity. ‘I suppose I’m becoming an old softie, but just this once. Get the girls in the van and hop in yourself.’
The girls quickly packed and ran to the van, throwing their bags in and climbing aboard amidst happy laughter, followed by the old doorman. A couple of the girls reached down to help him up, then Slonský closed the doors and patted the side to indicate that it could go.
‘I don’t know, Navrátil, there’s something wrong about people being happy to get locked up. The world’s changing, you know.’
‘Won’t their boss be straight round to spring them?’
‘Not if he doesn’t have papers. But in any case they’re not going to our station. I’ve told the driver to take them to Kladno. That should make it that little bit harder for their boss to get them out. And I’m sure Peiperová will be delighted to join us for questioning if it means she can drop in on her folks for a coffee and cake. Her mother does a very nice poppy seed cake, as I recall.’
The girl could hardly stop her hands shaking as she sipped her coffee. At first she declined a pastry, but Peiperová ordered a selection for them and was watching as her new acquaintance made short work of the plateful.
‘I’m Kristýna,’ said Peiperová, extending a hand. The Bosnian girl hurriedly wiped her sticky fingers on a napkin and shook it.
‘Daniela.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Daniela. I’m trying to get in touch with girls who work at the Padlock Club. Do you work there?’
Daniela shook her head vigorously. ‘No, I work at the Purple Apple.’
‘I don’t know that one,’ Peiperová confessed, though her knowledge of Prague’s club scene was hardly encyclopaedic.
Daniela cast her eyes down and chased a crumb round her plate reflectively. ‘It is … unusual place. It is club for women only.’
‘I see. Gay women?’
Daniela nodded. ‘But I am not such!’ she quickly added. ‘I don’t like to work there. But it is better than other job they give me.’
‘Other job?’
‘When I come to Prague they tell me there is no job as musician in orchestra. I play flute. Also piccolo.’
‘You’re a musician? But surely there are jobs in bands here?’
‘I don’t have papers. They don’t give them back when we cross border. And they took my flute. It is expensive to get another one. They tell me I have to be with men, or I can dance, so I dance for women.’ She gave a bitter half-laugh. ‘At least you don’t get a baby with women.’
‘Did someone you knew fall pregnant?’
Daniela nodded mutely.
‘A Bosnian girl?’
‘Yes.’
Peiperová believed she could guess the answer to the next question, but she asked it anyway. ‘What happened to her?’
Daniela’s eyes glistened with tears, and she wrapped a paper napkin around her hand as she pushed her knuckles into her mouth to stifle her crying.
‘She cut herself dead.’
‘She cut her wrists?’
‘Please — wrists?’
Peiperová mimed cutting her wrists with her knife, realising a little too late that the waitress was watching. She came running and grabbed the knife.
‘We don’t want that sort of thing in here,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to make a scene I shall call the police.’
Peiperová displayed her badge. ‘I am the police,’ she said.
‘Then you should know better,’ the waitress announced before flouncing off.
Slonský leaned back and opened the rear nearside door.
‘Hop in, lass. Got the coffee and pastries?’
‘There you are, sir.’
‘Spot of good fortune your being in a café when Navrátil called. Now, what did you find out?’
‘The girl Daniela doesn’t work at the Padlock Club. She works at the Purple Apple. She knew the girl who killed herself, sir. She says that although they work in different places, the Bosnian girls sometimes meet in the markets. She overheard the other girl — she’s called Milena, by the way — when they were out shopping and they spoke to each other. She met her again a couple of weeks later and said Milena looked awful. She had a bruise on her cheek and a cut on her hairline, and she looked like she hadn’t slept for days. She said two men had raped her and now she was pregnant. That was the last time Daniela saw her. She heard a couple of days later than Milena had cut her wrists.’
‘Did she know anything else that might help?’
‘She said Milena lived in a hostel somewhere.’
‘We know that, girl. That’s where we’ve just been.’
‘A women’s hostel? Without a woman officer?’
‘You can’t be in two places at once, lass. And Navrátil escaped unmolested, though it was a damn near-run thing. I blame those dimples when he smiles. You must have noticed them.’
Peiperová fired a glare at Navrátil as if he had been bestowing his affections on the whole of Czech womanhood. Since he was studiously inspecting the wing mirror, he failed to notice, which only annoyed her more.
‘Did she know who brought her here, Peiperová?’
‘She knew both Savović and Brukić, sir. She says Brukić came with the minibus and Savović was waiting here when they arrived. She says somewhere in Hungary they got out of the bus and were put into a truck full of tins of peaches. After a while they were allowed out to stretch their legs and go to the toilet by the roadside, then they had to get back in for the rest of the journey.’
‘By the roadside?’ said Navrátil. ‘Couldn’t they make a run for it?’
‘The men watched them,’ Peiperová snapped.
‘That’s disgusting,’ replied Navrátil. ‘How embarrassing for them.’
‘In the overall scheme of things, Navrátil, being watched while you have a pee probably comes a fair way down the list of nasty things that can happen to you compared with being beaten up and raped.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Navrátil agreed, ‘but it’s still wrong.’
Slonský eyed his assistant carefully. ‘Your obstinacy does you credit, lad. There’s such a thing as right and wrong and I was guilty of relativism. I should know, it was a regular complaint against me when the Communists were in charge. I kept arguing that maybe there was less theft in the Communist bloc than the West not because we were model citizens but because there was damn all to steal, and I got accused of inexact relativism. Plus cultural deviation, though I never quite knew what that was. And that’s despite a week in Brno at re-indoctrination camp.’
‘Re-indoctrination camp?’ parroted Peiperová.
‘Like Pioneer Camp but for bad boys. People like me who had forgotten that we were living in an earthly paradise. We had lessons on Marxist theory. There was a poster of Marx on one side of the blackboard, and a picture of Engels on the other side. I asked why we never got any lessons on Engelsian theory.’
‘And what was the answer, sir?’
‘I got taken outside and kicked a few times. And they took my soup off me at dinner time, but that was a blessing. Then I had a stroke of good fortune. The Central Committee of the Communist Party sent some bigwig down to see how the camp functioned, and he decided to speak to me. I said I was disappointed that we’d had no
lectures on the important work of Engels. He asked if that was true, and the instructor was sacked when he heard that it was. I was sent back to duty as an exemplary student who had correctly identified the ideological deficiencies of a revisionist clique.’
‘What important work did Engels do then, sir?’ asked Navrátil.
‘I have no idea, and neither did the bigwig. But he thought he should have known, so he couldn’t ignore the fact that we hadn’t had it. There’s nobody as self-righteous as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’
They pulled off the highway and drove into Kladno. Peiperová had worked here before she moved to Prague and gave directions to the police station. Her old boss Sergeant Tomáš was standing by the front desk looking harassed.
‘Am I glad to see you!’ he declared. ‘That crew of cats has been yabbering away downstairs since they arrived. I have no idea what they’re going on about. Anyway, they’re all yours.’
‘Thanks for taking them in,’ said Slonský. ‘We wanted to get them somewhere where their pimps couldn’t reach them.’
‘I thought you said they were dancers?’
‘They are. But some of them are horizontal dancers, so to speak.’
Peiperová smiled broadly as Sergeant Tomáš welcomed her back.
‘How is Prague?’
‘Interesting, sir.’
‘Yes,’ said Slonský. ‘Your protégée has already made it to the heights of Acting Acting Captain.’
‘Really?’ said Tomáš. He motioned to them to go down to the cells, letting the young couple go first, then grabbed Slonský’s arm to hold him back as they followed. ‘Is there such a rank?’ he asked.
‘There must be,’ said Slonský. ‘She is one.’
Despite his insistence that this was a Prague operation, Tomáš readily joined in the processing of the girls and managed to find another female officer to help. Within a couple of hours they had collected names and addresses and taken something approaching a statement from each of them. Slonský and Navrátil had finished and rejoined Tomáš and Peiperová.
‘What happens now?’ asked Tomáš. ‘The cells aren’t big enough for fourteen of them. The doorman’s all right — he gets a cell to himself — but the women can’t all sleep in the other cell.’
‘Have you got a hotel in town?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s give them a call to see if they have a few rooms free. I’m sure we can beat them down on price at this time of night.’
‘Isn’t that going to be expensive, sir?’ whispered Navrátil. ‘Captain Lukas wouldn’t sign it off.’
‘No, but Acting Acting Captain Peiperová will. Especially if it means she can spend a night with her parents. Do they have a sofa?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then why don’t you pop off too and see the future in-laws? Take the car and come back for me in the morning.’
‘Right, sir,’ beamed Navrátil.
Slonský had given the girls their instructions. ‘Dinner, then you go to your rooms and stay there. If anyone leaves their room they get taken back to the bad men in Prague. Understand?’
There was a lot of nodding and vociferous agreement with this plan.
‘Then at 07:30 tomorrow we all have breakfast. I’m sorry you didn’t have time to pack spare clothes…’
‘Yes, we pack,’ the brunette replied. ‘We have bags in the big van.’
A poor young waiter was sent out to help the doorman unpack the bags and return them to their owners. By the time this was done Slonský had decided he just had time for a beer with Tomáš before he turned in for the night too.
‘If you need some clean clothes I could raid the uniform store at the station,’ Tomáš offered.
‘No, thanks. I doubt you have anything that fits me. Prague never did.’
The waiter slid a large glass in front of each of them. Practised drinkers both, they caressed it with their eyes before taking a long slurp in appreciative silence.
‘That was worth waiting for,’ said Tomáš.
‘It’s a decent drop of beer,’ Slonský conceded. ‘Don’t you get told off for drinking in uniform?’
‘The district captain doesn’t like it, but she’s so uptight you couldn’t floss her bum.’
‘Maybe Peiperová will turn out like that.’
‘Nah, she’s a good girl. Knocks spots off anyone else I’ve had here. Doing well, is she?’
‘Very well. Don’t tell her I said so, though. She and Navrátil have hit it off.’
‘Hit it off or had it off?’
‘I doubt the latter. Navrátil doesn’t hold with sex before marriage. I’m not too sure he’s in favour of it after marriage, for that matter. Very straight-laced is young Navrátil. Another good cop, though. I’m bringing them on nicely. One day they’ll be running the Czech police, you mark my words. And they’ll do a damn sight better job than our generation did.’
They drank some more, then Slonský had a random thought. ‘Didn’t you ever want to go higher?’
‘I did.’
‘Why didn’t you, then?’
‘No, I mean, I was higher. I was a captain under the old regime.’
‘What happened?’
‘I arrested the mayor’s brother in the town where I was. When democracy came, he got his own back. I came out of the police station to find people fishing a carrier bag full of crowns out of the glove compartment of my car. No idea how it got there. I never took a bribe. Mind you, plenty were offered. Internal Affairs were called in, and we had a little chat.’
‘But you weren’t dismissed.’
‘No. They hadn’t checked a key detail. I wasn’t the last person to use the car. I’d lent it to the regional director of police the night before. They’d been so busy packing the glove compartment with used notes they hadn’t realised I’d walked to work. I pointed this out, and they tried to tell me it didn’t matter. He was obviously beyond reproach, so I must have put the money there. I mentioned the phrase “Beyond reasonable doubt” and the prosecutor agreed with me. Anyway, I knew if they didn’t get me then they would later, so I negotiated a transfer. They cut my salary but they got me a police house rent-free so it made little difference.’
‘And are you happy here?’
‘Very. Due to retire next year or the year after. They leave me alone, more or less. The local captain knows I was a captain myself once and doesn’t cross me too often. All in all, life is good. Until some big-shot Prague detective billets a busload of floozies on me.’
Chapter 8
Slonský was contemplating a very large plate of ham and cheese when his phone rang.
‘Hello, Sergeant Mucha. How are you this bright morning?’
‘I’m well, thank you. And how are you? More to the point, where are you?’
Slonský explained the events of the previous afternoon and evening.
‘I know all that,’ said Mucha. ‘A couple of large Bosnian gentlemen came round last night and threatened the night sergeant with a fence post if he didn’t give their girls back.’
‘Which end?’
‘What do you mean, which end?’
‘Which end of the fence post did they threaten him with?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I bet it would to him.’
‘I think they planned to club him with the blunt end. Anyway, he took them on a tour of the cells to prove they weren’t here.’
‘If he’d had his wits about him he could have unlocked a cell and pushed them in.’
‘I’ll tell him that when he’s stopped shaking. That’ll make him feel heaps better. Anyway, the purpose of this call…’
‘Oh, so there is a purpose to it, then?’
‘The purpose of this call,’ Mucha repeated, ‘is to suggest that they may be on the lookout for you, since they knew to come here, so they may well think that wherever you are, the girls will be.’
‘Very bright of them. As you can probably hear in the back
ground, the girls are indeed with me.’
‘You’re not taking this seriously,’ Mucha complained. ‘You may get the pointy end of the fence post. Don’t say you weren’t warned.’
‘Fair enough. But they don’t know where to look for me, do they? Unless they’re tapping this call.’
‘Just in case, don’t answer your mobile to any number you don’t recognise. Is Navrátil with you?’
‘Umm … he’s nearby.’
‘Then I’ll call his number if I want to talk to you. What are you going to do with those girls?’
‘We need to get them to a safer place. Eventually they’ll go home, but we need a couple as witnesses. There are another couple that Peiperová found who need rounding up and keeping safe. I only know them as Suzana and Daniela, but when we’re back in Prague we’ll go looking for them.’
‘You’d better not bring the girls back to Prague. Not unless you can put them in prison.’
‘That’s not a bad idea. And I bet that’s where the Bosnians think the girls will be taken. How about sending a couple of our brightest to swing by the gates of Pankrác to look out for a welcoming party?’
‘I might ask Dvorník to take a look. A pair of hulking Bosnians won’t worry him.’
‘Just make sure there’s no bystanders. He’ll be itching for them to produce a weapon so he can perforate them with some personal artillery of his own and some innocents might get hit.’
‘You always tell me nobody is innocent. Everyone is guilty of something.’
‘If you’re going to quote my own wisdom against me I’m going to hang up and tackle my breakfast.’
‘Bon appétit,’ said Mucha.
Since Navrátil had no idea what time the Peiper household would wake up, he slept fitfully, but contentedly. Shortly after six o’clock Mr Peiper came down and boiled a kettle for his shave. He offered a blade to Navrátil, who shaved in the kitchen sink. The family had a hearty breakfast, leading Navrátil to wonder how Peiperová retained her figure if she put away this amount every day of her life until the last six months, and then Peiperová gathered up the plates and lobbed a tea-towel into his lap.