“ ‘Cards on the table’?” Adriane laughed. “What are you, my grandfather?”
“You’re looking for Max. So am I. We both want the same thing. So why not help each other?”
“Just to be clear,” I said. “You’re stalking me—transatlantically—because you want to help.”
“I want answers.”
“I don’t have them,” I said. “And this has nothing to do with Max. We’re on spring break.”
“No, your school is on spring break. You’re on the lam.”
“ ‘On the lam’?” Adriane echoed.
“Call me Grandpa,” Eli snapped. “I don’t care. And keep lying, that’s fine. But if you’re so sure Max is innocent, you shouldn’t care if I come with you. Hell, maybe he is innocent. But he knows something.”
“Even if he did, how is it your job to find out?” I asked.
“Who else is going to do it? The idiot local cops? All they care about is not looking stupid on the evening news. And all you care about is helping your poor little lost boyfriend. Someone’s got to care about Chris.”
“Screw you,” Adriane said.
“Come on,” I told her. “Let’s just go.”
“Lead the way,” Eli said.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
“That’s excellent,” Adriane said. “Say it just like that when the cops get here. Nice and creepy.”
“You’re as bad a liar as she is,” Eli said. “You want to call over a cop? Fine. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to reunite you with your chaperones.”
“You were right about him,” Adriane told me.
“Would this be about my cuteness factor?” Eli asked. “It grows on you, doesn’t it.”
She turned her back on him, and we started for the gate, ignoring the footsteps behind us. “He must have been adopted.”
6
Sometime in the night, somewhere in Germany, moonlit countryside streaking past, blotches in the darkness that might have been cows, trees, houses, or smudges on the window, Eli snoring in his half of the compartment, Adriane curled around her backpack with her knees kissing her forehead, my passport tucked safely into a pouch wrapped around my waist, beneath my jeans—a parent-imposed security measure that had seemed like overkill only until we’d crossed our first national border, and the train conductor, as if rehearsing his lines for some World War II movie, demanded to see our papers—the train rumbling beneath us, its pitch and ferocity unchanged by the shifting terrain, iron tracks stretching through empty fields and unpronounceable small towns, Wuppertal and Bielefeld and Bad Schandau, racing the rising sun, I gave up on sleep.
“Adriane?” I whispered. The two of us were sharing the hard, plastic pallet, our heads only a few inches apart. When we arrived in the compartment, there had been another passenger here, his weathered face peering at us over a wrinkled newspaper, a thin column of smoke drifting up from behind the newsprint despite the DÉFENSE DE FUMER/RAUCHEN VERBOTEN/NO SMOKING signs accompanied by easy-to-understand red graphics. Eli had said something in what he claimed was “rusty high school French,” something rapid and annoyed, and within seconds, the old man had folded his newspaper, gathered his bulky duffel, and left us on our own. “I just told him I was afraid we might disturb him with our youthful chatter,” Eli explained. “He was grateful for the warning.” He hadn’t looked grateful; he had looked obedient.
“Adriane?” I whispered again, slightly louder. “You awake?”
Her yes was so soft I thought I might have imagined it.
“What are you thinking about?” she whispered.
But I couldn’t answer, because that topic was off-limits.
“Me too,” she whispered after a moment.
Some things were easier to talk about in the dark.
“But we’ll find him,” she added. “He’ll be fine.”
Not Chris—Max. I felt a stab of guilt. She was right. Max was the one I should be worrying about; Max was the one I could still save.
“You really think you love him?” Adriane whispered. “Do-anything-for-him, happily-ever-after true love?”
It must have been the darkness, or the jet lag. Because we didn’t talk like this. Ever.
“You know I do.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that. True love. Remember?”
“That was before.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Before Max, I had spoken, with the authority of ignorance, of true love as a modern construct, a rationalization to preserve monogamy in a modern society founded on abundance of choice, a sex-and-hormone-fueled illusion, a fairy tale created by fairy tales, all those Grimm stories whose maidens chose their Prince Charmings by bank account and real-estate holdings—and even when Disney took over and set the birds and fish and teakettles to trilling about irrelevancies like true love, the hero was always a wealthy prince, the happy ending a happiness of plenitude and gold. True love is for good wedding toasts and bad movies, I had told Adriane two years before, mostly because I was sick of listening to her nauseating paeans to the many wonders of Chris, the inadequacy of language like fireworks and chemistry to describe the explosions between them, the detailed elaborations on their future together, her Empire-waist wedding gown, his surprise honeymoon to Bali, their two-point-five children and compromise between his white-picket-fence fantasies and her Malibu beach house, which “don’t worry, Nora, will be complete with an old-maid room just for you. Kidding.” I had relinquished the down-with-love campaign when I met Max. Adriane had stopped talking about the future.
“What about you?” I asked.
Silence. Eli murmured in his sleep, sounding afraid.
“You still think you would have ended up together?”
“I don’t think about that,” she said.
“Okay.”
After a long moment. “How am I supposed to know?”
“I shouldn’t have asked.”
But she kept going. “It’s not normal to know something like that now. It’s not like we were going straight from graduation to the wedding chapel. Even if that’s what he wanted.”
“That’s not what he wanted.”
She sat up. “You know this how?”
“I know Chris.” Knew Chris.
“Whereas I was just the girlfriend.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Yes, it is,” she said quietly. “It always is.”
Something about the way she said it made me think she’d been stewing on that one for a long time. “Adriane, I never meant to—”
“You don’t know everything, Nora. Not even about him.”
“So tell me. Tell me anything. Just talk to me.”
Adriane lay down again and tucked her knees back to her chest. “Because you’re my best friend and you want to be there for me?”
“That sums it up.”
“You were his best friend,” she whispered. “Not mine.”
It wasn’t true, not in the way I knew she meant it. But it wasn’t enough of a lie that I could argue.
“I’m still here,” I told her. “Whenever you need me. I promise.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Then consider it a gift.”
There was a long silence, filled only with deep, even breathing and the rumbling of the train, and then an isolated word floating softly in the dark, as if unrelated to anything that came before. “Okay.”
We both lay still, and quiet. But I didn’t sleep. And I could see her eyes—neither did she. Germany swallowed us up. Eli moaned in his sleep. Adriane watched him; I watched her.
“What do we do about him?” she whispered as the sky was pinking up.
“He’s fine.” He lay on his side, his back to us, his head like a mess of porcupine needles, black hair jutting out in all directions. “We can’t trust him,” she said softly.
“Obviously. But …”
“But what?”
�
��He just wants to find out who did it. Same as we do.”
“He wants to use us to find Max. For all you know, the cops sent him. Anyone could have.”
“We’ll handle it,” I whispered.
“Or we grab his wallet and passport and dump him at the next stop.”
“Funny.”
“Not joking.”
“I vote with Nora,” Eli murmured, still turned away. “Majority rules. Now shut up so I can sleep.”
7
Paris, what little we saw of it, had been less strange than strangely familiar, a postcard landscape of greatest hits. From the Eiffel Tower to the picturesquely quaint boulangeries; from the women with chic heels and flowing scarves biking along the river, baguettes in their baskets, to the old men feeding the pigeons beneath Notre Dame; from the beret-clad artists painting riverscapes to the river itself—crisscrossed by bridges, ferrying a parade of sightseeing cruises, lined with used-book stands on one side and hulking white monuments to neoclassical urban planning on the other—the city felt like one big movie set.
Prague was alien.
The language sounded and looked not just foreign but unknowable, consonants jumbled, vowels missing, strange accents—all of them blaring at us in stark Communist-era black and red, Východ, Kouření zakázáno, Zákaz fotografování, Zavřeno. The cars were different, squat and stubby, as if the highways had been diverted from the seventies. Even the people looked different, in a way I couldn’t have described but knew I wasn’t imagining, their faces and clothes all sharing the same basic elements as mine, the same noses and eyebrows and hemlines, but all the same fundamentally not.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. It was a different country; it was supposed to be different. But I hadn’t expected it to be, as I hadn’t expected how abruptly the depressing Communist-bloc architecture, with its dingy cement cubes and rusting balconies, would, as the taxi drove us from the train station into the heart of the old city, give way to ornate gray moldings, cobblestone streets, Gothic churches, the watchful gaze of stone saints. Nor had I expected that, as the city swallowed us up, the strange would resolve itself into a place I had seen so vividly in my imagination, in Elizabeth’s letters. I hadn’t expected that her Prague, that sixteenth-century village teeming with rats and God and plague, was still here.
The cab stopped, and the driver said something I could only have repeated with marbles in my mouth. Eli—whose unexpected usefulness I’d vowed never to admit—responded with “Děkuji,” the word for thank you I’d memorized in my guidebook but until that moment had no idea how to pronounce, and handed him a wad of the Czech crowns we’d gotten from the currency-exchange booth at the train station.
“Děkuji,” I mumbled.
Jánský vršek 7. We were here.
8
Max wasn’t. Jánský vršek 7 was a narrow pension sandwiched between an empty tavern and a bluish building with a brass cross on the door and a porcine stone beast jutting out of the lintel. Trapped in the purgatory between motel and hostel, the Zlatý kanec—the Golden Boar, Eli translated—had eleven rooms for rent, all of them vacant, though this was only established once Eli had haggled the stooped owner down from a ridiculously cheap price to an even cheaper one. This despite the fact that the manager—whose thinning cardigan was held together over his belly with an array of mismatched buttons and whose remaining teeth looked like they’d been removed and reattached by a toddler only just learning about square pegs and round holes—could presumably have used the extra cash. Maybe I should have felt grateful to Eli, but instead I felt mute and helpless, like some kid traipsing after his parents, beholden to their dictates and their whims.
“Passports,” the manager said, in a thick accent.
I slid my hand beneath the waistband of my jeans to wriggle the passport out of its holder, while Adriane, who despite my warnings kept hers tucked into the inside pocket of a purse that didn’t even close at the top, already had hers out—but we were both stopped short by the power of Eli’s scorn. Excusing himself to the manager, he dragged us into the corner of what passed for the inn’s lobby, a domed space with cobblestone floors indistinguishable from the street and its formerly grand stone walls papered with peeling signs for movies, art exhibits, bands, and—judging from the crudely drawn graphics—plumbers’ union protests, almost all having taken place in the previous decade.
“No passports,” Eli hissed.
Adriane rolled her eyes. “Somehow I doubt this guy’s connected to Interpol.”
Eli treated her to an exaggerated eye roll of his own. “It’s almost like you’ve never snuck your way into a foreign country before. Pay in cash, fake names, no IDs, trust me.”
I couldn’t ask how Max was supposed to find me if he didn’t know I was here. And so, after some fast-talking from Eli, a promise that we would, as per the rules, dutifully leave our key with the front desk whenever leaving the building, and an additional 140 crowns changing hands, we got our large brass room keys with nothing more than a scout’s-honor promise that the fake names we put on our registration forms were accurate. Eli took the room at one end of the hall that smelled like fish, while Adriane and I took the identical room at the other, dumping our bags on the thin mattresses that bore faint stains of bodily fluids and—I could only imagine—secreted used condoms and colonies of bedbugs in their dark crevices.
“You take the good one,” Adriane said, nodding at the bed with slightly fewer stains. A peace offering. “And about what I said last night, it was late and—”
“We were both exhausted,” I cut in before the awkward apologizing could begin. “We were practically talking in our sleep.”
“So, you’re okay with—”
“Everything’s okay,” I said. It didn’t matter anymore who had known Chris better, who had felt obligated and who had felt like an obligation. It didn’t matter, because Chris was gone. “But I think I left something in the lobby.”
What mattered was asking the toothless man behind the desk whether there’d been any messages left for a Nora Kane, and deciphering the code on the small note that he handed me, the code that I now understood and that told me where I should go at midnight. What mattered was that Max would be there, too.
9
“What is it?” I asked Eli as he hesitated in the doorway of the inn. We’d decided to start our search (for information, if not—as Eli and Adriane may have thought—for Max) in the most logical place for any dutiful student of the Hoff’s: the public library. That was where the Hoff had, based on the note I’d found in his office, met a man named Ivan Glockner, and maybe where he’d first learned of the Hledači.
According to our map, the library was a simple walk down the hill and across the river into the heart of Staré Město, or Old Town. We were staying on the left bank of the Vltava, up a steep hill from the river, in Malá Strana, a worm’s nest of narrow, twisting cobblestone streets and alleys; dingy storefronts, with crosses or chalices or marionettes hanging in dingy windows; brown-robed monks strolling beside habited nuns, ushered by bells to one church or another; and shadowing it all, the double spires of St. Vitus Cathedral, centerpiece of Hradčany Castle, former home of the Holy Roman emperor, secular emissary of God himself.
Elizabeth Weston walked these streets, I thought, and my hand crept to my abdomen of its own accord, where beneath my shirt, tucked into the pouch with my passport, was the letter Chris had, just maybe, died to protect.
Eli wasn’t moving. He took a deep breath.
“What?” I said again.
“You know where the name Prague comes from?” he asked.
“No. And don’t feel the need to—”
“No one does. Some people think it’s from the word prahy, which means eddies in the river. Or na praze, which is basically a dead, empty place with no shade. But you know which explanation I like the best? Pražiti. It means the cleansing of the forest by fire. Doesn’t that sound about right? Cleansing, like the fire is doing everyone a favor. Even
though all you end up with when it’s done is a dead place with no shade.”
I began to wonder whether jet lag could have hallucinogenic effects.
“I told myself I wouldn’t do this,” he said.
“Slow us down?” Adriane said. “Fail.”
He ignored her and wouldn’t look at me. “My parents spent my whole life preparing me for this. This place, I mean.”
“His parents are Czech,” I told Adriane. “They’re obsessed with the old country.”
“Yeah, I hear life was bliss under the Communists,” she said. “Can’t imagine why anyone ever left.”
“They were kids,” Eli said. “Kids don’t care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade knedlíky. It’s home. They didn’t notice the tanks in the backyard and the blood in the streets.”
Even before she spoke, I could tell Adriane had exhausted her limited ability to feign interest. I’d heard Ms. Kato talk wistfully, endlessly, about the lost wonders of her parents’ homeland, a country in which she’d never spent more than two weeks in a row, time that was unfailingly passed in a Ritz-Carlton or a luxury car with tinted windows and a native guide. Adriane didn’t have much patience for anything, but when it came to the ambivalences of immigration, she’d exceeded her limit the year she’d wanted to be a pirate for Halloween or, at the very least, a samurai—her mother had instead stuck her in a kimono. “Not to sound like one of those people, but maybe they should just go back where they came from.”
“That’s supposed to be my job,” Eli said. “That’s what it was all for. I told them it was a waste of their time. I promised myself I would never come here. But … here I am.”
“There’s a way to fix that,” Adriane said.
“Shut up, Adriane.”
I didn’t know why I said it. And judging from her expression, neither did she.
“Let’s go,” Eli said, shaking off whatever held him in place. “Guess you can’t argue with destiny.”
10
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 17