The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  “He escaped,” said Grace.

  William puzzled over this a moment. A woman approached, from the opposite direction. She was in her late fifties or sixties and wore leather pants and a revealing top. He lifted his finger and she stopped. They spoke Czech for a while and both of them looked at Grace. They came to a determination together.

  “There is every chance your friend is a regular Czech expatriate who somehow crossed razor wire fences, dodged bullets and German shepherds. That’s what it was like after the so-called normalization, in the early seventies.” William paused and appeared to think some more. “There’s every chance your friend escaped but enormously unlikely for anyone but a superhero. You see, Grace, towards the end of the regime, in 1989, when the KGB and StB and higher-ups in the party began destroying what they could destroy there was a hierarchy of destruction. Do you understand?”

  The woman, who did not seem to speak English, walked away.

  “I think so,” said Grace.

  “They burned and shredded files that would incriminate them personally. Revenge was coming, as I said. These men would have remembered what had happened at the end of the Second World War, to Nazis and collaborators.”

  “Hangings in the village square.”

  “Yes. But more importantly, these were also some very powerful men and women who were confident of one thing.”

  “What?”

  “They would get back inside.”

  “Inside?”

  “Inside the castle. These were entitled people who understood government. So they destroyed any compromising documents that could prevent their return to political power. Some documents they locked away for future use. Blackmail, usually.”

  Grace turned the pages of the first Cibulka guide. “I’m looking for someone named Sergei Sorokin.”

  “That’s not a Czech name.”

  “He’s Russian, but he worked here. Let’s say he was KGB.”

  “May I?” William flipped the pages to the agents section, found nothing, and then consulted the second guide, with the list. Again, nothing. “The KGB wouldn’t be in here. What does Sergei Sorokin do now? Is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know. Another person I was looking for, he’s not in here either.”

  “Like I said, maybe he was a superhero. But in 1989, the first thing people did was protect themselves. The second thing they did was to burn and shred and delete everything related to their foreign assets.”

  “Assets?”

  “Sorry. Human assets. Their agents and collaborators abroad. Because when they found their footing, back in power, they would need these people. No matter what the new regime looked like in Czechoslovakia or Russia.”

  “So either my man was nobody or…”

  “Or he was a somebody.” William opened and closed the giant book of names. “I’m half Czech. My father was of the generation who made it out in 1968, before everything became ugly. He arrived in London with a suitcase. When this book was published he looked up some of his friends. It inspired some interesting conversations over dinner.”

  William looked at her.

  “The people he most suspected, the people he was sure about: they weren’t in the book.”

  Grace thought for a moment. “Maybe they were too important?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Any other names? I mean, I apologize, but if you’re looking for powerful KGB men who are still powerful, you’ll find nothing revealing in this or any archive.”

  Grace stood up, taking in his awful sweater and thick glasses. “Why are you an approved researcher, William? How have you devoted your life to this?”

  “I’m an academic,” he said, a bit stiffly.

  “From where?”

  “I’m an associate professor of history at London South Bank University. Heard of it?” When Grace crossed her arms and dished him a suspicious look, he grinned. “I’m currently writing a paper on recruitment methods in the Velvet Revolution and the Arab Spring. Are you looking for any other names?”

  “You didn’t follow me here?”

  Now he laughed out loud. “No. I did not follow you here.”

  She looked at him for another moment and decided he was too gangly and awkward to be a spy. Then she sat down next to him again and looked at the Ks. William swapped his distance glasses for reading glasses.

  There was one Klimentová and more than one Kliment, the masculine form, on the list.

  Grace closed her eyes for a while and opened them again. There they were: Petr Kliment and Jana Klimentová. Petr’s code name was the same as his real name, but Jana’s was not.

  “Code name Vrba,” said William. “In Czech, that means willow.”

  Grace could smell the piss in her hotel room toilet. She turned around to see if any of the librarians were looking at them, and then used her phone to take a picture of Elena’s parents’ names.

  William put his distance glasses back on. “Tell me about Petr and Jana.”

  12

  PARIS, 1971

  Kara Modeling had booked a restaurant near the École Militaire in the chic 7th arrondissement of Paris for their Christmas party. The party was for agency partners and potential clients across Europe to meet the girls in a relaxed setting. Senior members of the French government were also invited, along with diplomats of other nations, heads of corporations, and journalists. A layer of wet snow covered the cobblestones of Rue Cler, and the hotel was three blocks away, so Elena wore leather boots that reached nearly to her knees, sexy but sensible. Danika chose high heels.

  “I don’t know why Sergei married you off so early.” Danika slipped, let out a tiny shriek, and reached out for Elena.

  Elena caught her. She knew that with Danika it would never be any other way. She held the drinks, she carried the jackets, she remained sober. She shushed Danika when she said things like this out loud, in echoey French streets, and caught her when she fell.

  “I am having an absolute ball in New York,” Danika said. “Strasbourg? Honestly, in America no one has even heard of Strasbourg. Why aren’t you at least in Paris, for God’s sake?”

  “We have two girls in Paris already.”

  At Avenue de la Motte-Picquet, where the market street opened into a slushy thoroughfare of cars and transport trucks, Danika moved Elena under the awning of a pharmacy. Her eyes and her voice turned serious. “Are you getting anything from your Monsieur Jean-Yves?”

  Elena’s husband was not turning out as planned. Jean-Yves was so rich he did not have to work, though he did work—a little. The more time he spent with her, the more time they spent here in Paris, on the Riviera, in Italy, skiing in the Alps, the less time Jean-Yves spent on his original plan: to join the Council of Europe, then to be mayor, and finally, encouraged by his Gaullist grandfather: to be president of the Republic.

  In Strasbourg, they lived in a stone mansion with two servants, facing a beautiful park called the Orangerie. The orange trees were the Emperor Napoleon’s gift to his wife Joséphine and every fruit and flower, Jean-Yves said, carried the soul of romance. Jean-Yves bought Elena gifts. He sang to her, and he wanted to make love constantly—even now, six months after their hasty marriage.

  Elena had not lied to Sergei about his waning ambition, but in their monthly debriefing sessions she had not been entirely honest either.

  “He’s introducing me to powerful people, Dani. He knows everyone.”

  “French powerful. I mean, what can Monsieur Jean-Yves give you that we can’t get in twenty minutes this evening? Over a glass of champagne with the prime minister’s chief of staff? God damn it, I’m going to seem a street harlot tonight, soaking wet.”

  “Why don’t we go back? You can change.”

  “I don’t want to change.” They walked under awnings for what remained of Avenue de la Motte-Picquet. “Would you like to know my theory, about why Sergei forced you to marry this bore of a Frenchman?”

  “He isn’t a bore.”

  “So you coul
d remain his.”

  Elena stopped outside the restaurant. Through the steamy window she watched the men in suits and women in tight dresses. “I’m not his,” she hissed. “Why would you say that?”

  In her darkest moments, Elena suspected she was just one of Sergei’s many special girls, that he recruited and controlled them all with promises of a life together when this was over: there would be a vast apartment in Moscow with a view of Red Square, the dacha, a place to ski in the winter and another place to swim in the summer. Children!

  “He has lots of girls.” Elena lifted her chin when she wanted to sound decisive.

  “No.” Danika had begun to shiver. “It’s just you.”

  It was hot inside, the restaurant moist and thick with the smells of wine and cigarettes. Danika abandoned Elena immediately and danced through the crowd, plucked two flutes of champagne from the nearest tray, both for herself. Sergei stood in the corner, speaking to two men. His French was heavily accented but he knew everything a man needed to know about wine, cheese, nos ancêtres les Gaulois. She knew the rules. No speaking to Sergei, not here. His latest cover had something to do with real estate. She did not understand why he could not stick to one cover. Inevitably, it seemed to her, a past client from one pretend existence would recognize him from another.

  What would he say? No, monsieur, you must have me confused with someone else. Or would he sprinkle ricin salt on the man’s breakfast eggs?

  * * *

  —

  Within an hour, Danika was drunk, so drunk that Monsieur Roche, the head of the French head office of Kara, had to take her aside. Elena, who had been listening to the owner of an advertising agency tell her she ought to be in movies, made her way through the crowd, dodging lit cigarettes, to intervene. The agency man followed her, loudly assuring her that he could take care of it, make the right kinds of introductions.

  Though she had been modeling part-time for less than a year, Elena had been offered a career in pictures more than five times—each at a cost of a visit to the right man’s hotel room. Her wedding ring never made a difference to them.

  “Listen to me, madame,” the agency man was saying to her as he pulled at her dress.

  Elena was about to dig her fingernails into his face when Sergei arrived and endeavored to make his way between them. As he did, he pretended to recognize her and spoke in English. “Is that Elena? Elena Klimentová?”

  “It is, sir. And you are?”

  “Why it’s Graham Spector. Spector Properties. We met in Colmar, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Of course. I remember, sir.”

  With this, the agency man retreated and Sergei led her toward Danika, who Monsieur Roche was forcibly guiding into a red banquette. It was a place for four, and Sergei politely removed a young man in a tuxedo and a model from Poland Elena had worked with at a photo shoot for Krug champagne. As they spoke, the only one who did not follow the rule about smiling constantly was Danika.

  “People are discussing her, her antics.” Monsieur Roche poured each of them a glass of white wine. “She threatens to ruin the atmosphere. And what’s to stop her from saying something?”

  “She will never.” Elena stared at Monsieur Roche. “Anyway, Dani did not get anything to eat. I’ll take her to the hotel.”

  Sergei stood up. “I’ll join them and then return.”

  Elena helped her friend up and over to the door. On the way, Danika snatched and gulped down another flute of champagne. “I’m not drunk, you know.”

  Elena buttoned Danika’s long black jacket. “I know.”

  “It’s a strategy of mine, to appear vulnerable.” She slurred her words and did not quite make it all the way through vulnerable. “Then a man will tell me anything.”

  They began their journey back to the hotel, Elena shouldering most of Danika’s weight. They were not far from the hotel when Sergei arrived with apologies. He did not move as quickly as he once did. Life as a real estate executive had begun to thicken him around the middle.

  Danika stumbled and righted herself. “Empty leisure. That’s what you gave our Elena, Sergei. Look at me. Adventure!” Her voice filled the narrow street, deserted in the cold. “Adventure! She’s wasting her talents and you, comrade…you know it.”

  “But she lives in a beautiful house, Danika. Her husband is spending many thousands of francs, renovating it to make it even more beautiful. A beautiful life. He is, my sources tell me, a kind and loving man, very intelligent, entirely devoted to Elenka. He has given up everything to be a perfect beau. When once he worked to better himself, now he simply vacations in Saint-Tropez with his perfect wife.”

  “Do you love him, your handsome Frenchman?” Danika said.

  Sergei answered for her. “Even if she does love him, love is not enough. Is it, Elena?”

  13

  PRAGUE, 2016

  In the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, William Kovály was silent. He had removed his glasses and now he was staring into space, thoughtfully. Grace had finished telling him about Petr and Jana and their famous daughter, the ex-wife and confidante of the man who could very easily be the next president of the United States.

  When he burst into action, it was to make a list. In Grace’s notebook, they wrote down a number of files to seek. They found registry numbers for Elena and her parents, and for Josef Straka. Then the women sitting at the horseshoe desk disappointed them. The files, if there were any files, had already been moved to the old town address of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.

  Grace had the route on her iPhone but she did not want to follow it or take William’s preferred streets and alleys. She couldn’t see anyone behind them, in the rain, but just as before she felt a presence. “Someone is following us. You know how you just know?”

  “No.” William kept up with her, looking around constantly. “How can you be sure someone just didn’t break into your room looking for something to steal?”

  Grace told him about the toilet but she did not mention the vibrator. “Then why didn’t they take my computer?”

  William did not answer. It was now so windy his umbrella kept turning inside out.

  They passed a hip Argentinian hamburger restaurant, and William led them down a dark, cobblestoned street. This was the final block before they reached the Institute so on the way she checked every door and alcove, looked up at the balconies. Cars were parked along the side in both directions but each of them was empty.

  “I did a paper once, on conspiracy theories. Can I speculate, Grace?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You trained as a journalist, you worked most of your career in supermarket tabloids, and now—”

  “I’m not making this up, William.”

  “It comes when we enter middle age, doesn’t it, a sense of desperation? Last year I very nearly bought an old Aston Martin convertible. It was more than I could afford, and entirely impractical. Needed loads of work. But it was yellow and I remembered, in my youth…”

  There was a gorgeous old building along the quay. Set back from it was a charcoal box of industrial stone, aggressively plain, with bars along the main floor windows.

  Grace reached the door of the old building and tried it. She knocked.

  “It’s not really a public building,” William told her.

  She knocked some more. Then she kicked the door. Ten minutes later, after William made a number of unsuccessful phone calls to people who presumably worked inside, it slowly opened.

  A pudgy stump of a man with Einstein hair opened his arms and hugged William. They reacquainted themselves in Czech and he introduced Grace as “Ameri-chan.”

  They passed something in between a mailroom and a garbage stand and turned right, up some stairs. A man behind a security desk waved at William, and then the three men discussed the time and why this was the right or wrong time, with the building about to close. William pointed at Grace and made a plea. She shrugged and smiled.

 
“Ameri-chan.”

  Inside they passed women and men of all ages, in jeans and sweaters and security lanyards. Grace gathered, from people saying hello to him, that Einstein’s name was actually Milan. In his cramped corner office there were newspapers piled on the floor and files everywhere, ironic communist propaganda posters on the wall.

  As Milan slumped into his cracked leather chair and entered passwords into his desktop, William reached for Grace’s notebook. She was reluctant to give it up.

  “He’s going to search a few names for us,” William said.

  “For me, you mean.” Grace opened the notebook to the page with names and reference numbers.

  As Milan looked at the notebook, William said, “He has the master files.”

  “What are the master files?”

  William ran a hand through his still-wet hair as he considered how to answer this. “If a file exists, he will be able to see it. Or at least find it.”

  Milan entered names and registry numbers into his desktop and reported the results to William, who translated. He found what Grace had already found in the Cibulka books, that Petr and Jana were on the list of StB contacts, that Jana had a code name. But the Jana file had either been erased or destroyed. There were some documents on Petr and on Elena and Anthony Craig, so Milan printed them out. Josef Straka’s reference number led nowhere.

  “Almost everything he has on Elena and her husband has been blacked out,” said William. “And there is very little.”

  “That’s strange, no?”

  “The ex-wife of one of America’s most famous industrialists? An icon of capitalism? A man who could end up president?” William paused as Milan typed and shook his head. “Even in the ’70s and ’80s Elena would have been Czechoslovakia’s most prominent expatriate. Her file should be extensive. At one time there must have been truckloads.”

  Milan printed some documents.

  “It’s funny,” William said. “Until this morning, I never thought of Elena Craig as having any importance whatsoever. She is famous here. But everything she does is about spa treatments and shopping and gaudy clothes.”