The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  “It’s just a role she plays.” Despite the way Elena had treated her, Grace hated it when people said this about her. “And gaudy isn’t fair.”

  Milan looked at William like he was about to say something. Instead he turned to the computer and worked some more. He pressed some buttons and his printer clicked back to life. He pulled out two more sheets and handed them all to Grace. Almost every page was heavily blacked out. This was the full file on Elena Klimentová, nearly all of it connected to interviews with her father.

  The page on top had a photo of Elena and her address in Manhattan. Anthony Craig’s name was on it too, with a number. It was the number that had led to seven mostly redacted pages. There was a similar, older version, clearly typed, with an address in Strasbourg, France. In this one she was called Elena de Moulin. Again, most was blacked out but in the place of Anthony Craig, Jean-Yves de Moulin had been typed.

  “Is there information on Jean-Yves de Moulin?” said Grace.

  “Another empty file.” Milan turned back to the computer and brought up some documents, read through them, chuckled.

  “Can you ask him to share it?”

  William did, and translated Milan’s response. “The StB interviewed Petr—a lot. But there’s nothing of real interest in the material. It was about Elena and her husband but it’s banal and pointless, almost—”

  “Boring on purpose?”

  Milan pointed at Grace and William translated again. “That’s it. Like they removed the good stuff and left this as a decoy. So we will think it is nothing.”

  “Like shopping and gaudy clothes. Right?”

  * * *

  —

  Just after 4:00 p.m. they exited the old building into the street. The rainy day had turned dark and chilly. A fog from the river snaked up into the old town.

  “You think Anthony Craig will be elected?” said William.

  “I don’t know. Elena thinks he will.”

  “But the polls…”

  This conversation bored Grace in all languages. She looked around again. Again, there was no one that she could see but she felt them. William led her to a beer hall called U Fleků ten minutes away from the old town address of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, so he could collect the drink she owed him. There were almost no women in the austere yet jolly room, which was decorated in carved wood. A table full of men in their thirties, dressed for white-collar work, shouted a fearsome song along with a wandering accordion player. Grace and William sat across from one another at a long table, next to strangers. Without asking what anyone wanted, a server plopped down two mugs of black beer with a mountain of foam on top and another man delivered two shot glasses full of an amber liquid.

  Grace flipped through the printouts again. The two with the photographs of Elena were similarly structured, similarly blacked out. Whoever was in charge of the Czech version of a Sharpie had left one word, or nearly a whole word. William raised his mug of beer and encouraged her to do the same. They drank and looked at one another, their smiles transforming into something more awkward. Grace pulled the top sheet from the pile of paper Milan had printed off, with the partial word. She held it up to the light, and the hidden word was just about visible: dňáček.

  “What does this mean?”

  William switched glasses and held it up to the light. “It looks like it could be ledňáček.”

  “In English?”

  “Kingfisher, in English. The bird.”

  Grace drained the shot. Mead. It was too sweet so she chased it with beer. When she looked up, it felt like at least half of the room filled with Slavic men was staring at her. She wiped her top lip, to be sure there wasn’t a white moustache.

  The printouts suddenly seemed exposed. Grace folded them and closed them inside her notebook. She had also taken photographs with her phone. Now she put everything in her purse and pulled it close.

  “People keep looking at me.”

  William’s laugh powered down. “What?”

  “I don’t feel safe.”

  “You’re a beautiful woman in a room full of drunk men.” William reached over and put his hand on hers for a moment. “Of course people are looking at you. They can’t help it.”

  She didn’t trust anything anymore: his compliment or his help. What was this place he had taken her to? Grace did not understand a word anyone said, and if she drank any more her judgment wouldn’t be worth much either.

  “Thank you, William. That’s very kind.” She stood up and, at the cash station near the door, asked about the bill. She left double the amount, to buy William another round.

  By then, William was with her. “Where are you going?”

  “I didn’t sleep well, after everything last night, and I’m feeling…weird.”

  “Let’s have dinner at least.”

  “Another time, maybe.”

  “Where is this apartment? You mentioned it’s above a spice shop? It’s nearby? Let me walk you home.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  William laughed. “Come on. I’m a friend. Just an associate professor of history at the 979th best university in the world. Get some sleep and we can make another time tomorrow then. I’ll come by and take you for a proper dinner.”

  “Sure.”

  “Let me walk you home.”

  She wanted William to walk her home. While there was a clumsy aspect about him, he was more handsome the more she looked at him. He was clearly smart. Maybe it was the lingering effects of her hangover but she was suspicious of him, of his friend Milan, of this beer hall, and she wanted to go through everything in her purse without him. Grace pointed to the place where they had been sitting. There was already another beer waiting for him.

  * * *

  —

  The streets of old town Prague at night, with its pale yellow lanterns and cobblestones, narrow streets, and a steamy café on every corner, seemed to Grace designed for romantic thoughts. She imagined herself in one of them, William across from her, his hand on hers again, and regretted blowing him off. It was the echoing footsteps that pulled her out of her reverie, two sets of them. When she stopped, they stopped. She looked back and two men were on the sidewalk behind her. Grace pretended to check for texts, and they lit cigarettes. It was the two men from the train, the ones who had followed her into the square. The man in the leather motorcycle jacket, with the unsettlingly pretty eyes, was now wearing a black beanie. Continuing on, she used her phone camera as a mirror. The other man wore a long black coat and was slightly bow-legged. When she sped up, they sped up, but they did not get too close. In her left hand, hidden under her sleeve, she carried the paring knife.

  Nearer the Charles Bridge there were more people out strolling in their puffy down jackets, walking their dogs, buying sausages and mulled wine from street vendors. It was at first reassuring to be among them. Then she accidentally entered a crowded mall of tourist knick-knacks at the bridge and lost sight of the men following her. She ensured her purse was zipped tight and wrapped the straps around her wrist so no one could take it from her, preparing to scream and stab if they suddenly appeared too close. Trying to look in every direction at once she bumped into people, apologized breathlessly in what had become her language of pedestrian error: French.

  As she passed the entrance to the Charles Bridge the crowds thinned. Two African men in old-fashioned sailor outfits tried to sell her a trip on their boat for the following morning. She listened to their pitch, waiting for her pursuers. She could not see them.

  The apartment was only two blocks away. She ran and opened the heavy door that led into the courtyard next to the spice shop, and pulled it closed. For a few minutes she remained on the other side, in the cool corridor, listening for the footsteps.

  They came just as she was preparing to walk up to her apartment. At the door they stopped. Grace gently placed her purse on the stone ground. She held the knife in her right hand. In her left she held the apartment keys so the strongest of them
protruded from her knuckles, like her self-defense instructor at the Avenue du Parc YMCA had taught her.

  It was silent on the other side of the door. The men did not speak to one another or even move.

  We are here. We know where you live.

  Perhaps five minutes later she heard one of the shoes slide along the cobblestones, then they walked away. Grace was so tense she leaned against the wall of the corridor, to keep herself from sitting down.

  Upstairs, she bolted her door and propped a chair against it again. She went through all of her notes and printouts. Kingfisher, she thought. There should be truckloads of information about you. Why is there nothing? What are they trying to hide?

  Who are they?

  Grace looked at the page with Elena’s address in Strasbourg. Jean-Yves de Moulin. Elena de Moulin.

  On her computer she booked a flight for the next morning at six-thirty, from Prague to Strasbourg.

  14

  STRASBOURG, 1972

  Every morning at 9:15, after her breakfast and morning coffee, having made her way through Le Monde and Le Figaro, Elena ran through the Orangerie park in Strasbourg.

  The storks had arrived, symbols of Alsace, massive beasts that hardly seemed real. Yet here they were, long and white, across the street from her home, making giant nests out of lampposts and clicking their beaks at one another. They were both elegant and ungainly at once, which was not terribly far from the way Elena perceived herself.

  Like nearly every man she knew in France, Jean-Yves refused to run. For him, the daily morning jog was a harkening back to his origins when men had to stalk and chase their food. While he was convinced that it was good for the muscles and restorative for the mind, he preferred the sophistication of an afternoon swim.

  Elena watched the storks calling out to one another, click click click, building and repairing their nests. Now and then she caught a sheen of sunshine on the top of an egg. She ran, she stretched, she smelled the blooming lilac. There were ostriches, monkeys, and peacocks at the small zoo on the border of the Orangerie. Kids sprinted from swings to a mini-mountain of ropes in the small playground. At the end of her exercise, to cool down, she walked past the caged animals and felt a special kinship. They weren’t so different from her.

  That very morning she had watched Jean-Yves sleep. His family had been so successful for so long, through kings and queens and Germans and French, through war and through plague. He carried it in his face, even as he slept. There was not a problem a de Moulin could not solve. To enter the world this way, with this quiet, genteel confidence, she imagined the sort of children they would have. They would be good and polite and handsome, poised for leadership, gifted with modesty and curiosity.

  When he opened his eyes, in the morning sunshine, Jean-Yves smiled to see her looking at him.

  “What a thoughtful look on your beautiful face.”

  Instead of responding, she had simply kissed him. Now, having passed the monkeys and the peacocks, she stopped. Sergei was there, blocking her way, blocking everything, at the park gates, smoking a cigarette. Again he had grown, not only rounder but around the shoulders too. When she first knew him, Sergei had seemed a dangerous youth. Here was a man. His experiences, violent and secret, had nourished and expanded him.

  She was shocked by her immediate instinct: to run away.

  “It smells like heaven here.” Sergei approached her. “How lucky you are, Elenka, to have spent a year in such a lovely place.”

  They kissed, on both cheeks, like regular French friends. They spoke Czech, but this was a capital of Europe. Foreigners were hardly foreign in the Orangerie.

  “Why are you here, Sergei?”

  Sergei, in a dark suit with pinstripes, led the way back into the park. “I came to see you.”

  “Only to see me?”

  “To extract you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We thought Monsieur de Moulin would amount to more—be more—especially with your encouragement. In fact, he is less. We’re going to transfer you to a more fruitful location. Our woman in Montreal didn’t work out as we had hoped.”

  “You haven’t given me the time to—”

  “You want to stay? Stay with him? I can’t say I blame you. You have fallen into a life of absolute pleasure. Though I cannot see how I can justify your training, or all we’ve done for you and your family.”

  “All you’ve done? I…” Elena thought of her mother in a fancy new housedress, serving drinks in crystal glasses, her father out in his galoshes with a rifle and a hound.

  “It’s a courtesy visit, this stroll in the park. Your husband will be surprised, no doubt, by your departure, but I wanted to give you time to pack.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, Elenka. Tomorrow evening.”

  Elena took a deep breath, looked away from him. It took all of her effort to make it seem like this pleased her. “You will come with me to Montreal?”

  “I’ll help you get settled. Do you remember that favor you asked of me? For your boyfriend?”

  Elena knew he was talking about Josef Straka. “He is not my boyfriend and you know it.”

  “I recruited him. He’s there already.”

  “In Montreal?” Elena was shocked they had made all of these preparations for her.

  “You will have a friend.”

  “Thank you, Sergei.”

  “And I am in New York now, very close.”

  “Why can’t I be with you?”

  “You know why. We already have three girls in New York. Danika alone…”

  The way Sergei said her name bothered Elena. Of course he had been with her. He had been with them all. Neither of them would tell her the truth. None of them told the truth. She could not be jealous.

  Was she jealous?

  Maybe she could stay here in Strasbourg. If she revealed everything to Jean-Yves he could protect her. The French secret service, or maybe the English or Americans could make a trade, get her parents out of Prague if she told them what she knew.

  She sighed. There was no escape for her any more than the monkeys. Revealing who she was would mean the end of her, of them. The KGB could find anyone anywhere.

  “It’s a French city.” She smiled at Sergei.

  “And New York is so close, Elenka. We will find work for you, reasons to visit.”

  “You won’t hurt Jean-Yves, or threaten him, will you? This will be hard on him. He loves me.”

  “Leave all that to us.” Sergei put his hands on her upper arms and kissed her again, this time on the lips. His mouth was sour with cigarettes. “À demain,” he called as he walked back into the park. “À demain.”

  15

  STRASBOURG, 2016

  To Grace’s relief, Strasbourg was almost ten degrees warmer than Prague. Young people wandered through the compact city in jeans and stylish sweaters, dresses and Ray-Bans, nearly all of them with scarves. There were more bicycles than cars, most of them clunky on purpose. This was a flat city with a sense of humor, Grace thought.

  From her hotel in a gorgeous little neighborhood of half-timbered homes surrounded by canals it was only a thirty-minute walk through the busy yet somehow calm center to the Boulevard de l’Orangerie. Though Prague’s architecture was brighter, the air in Strasbourg—essentially another Central European city—was more alive, more hopeful.

  In her fatigue Grace wondered if the weight of communism had done something slow and dull to the people of Prague that Strasbourgeois had never experienced, could scarcely imagine.

  She looked about her. On the way to the airport at five in the morning there had been no sign of the two men who had followed her the previous day. On two walks up and down the little airplane from Prague to Strasbourg she had made eye contact with everyone. None of them had the face of a murderous thug.

  Grace took pictures of Strasbourg and imagined all of it in 1971 and 1972, which was not terribly difficult. Despite Starbucks in Place Kléber and the tram syste
m, little seemed to have changed since the end of the Second World War.

  The address of Jean-Yves de Moulin, confirmed online, was a three-storey stone mansion surrounded by foreign consulates. Up top was a fourth-floor tower or loft. The park was across the street. In the front garden, the fruit trees and shrubbery were trimmed and the leaves were raked, the flowerbeds turned and ready for winter. It was an elegant and obviously well-loved place.

  The de Moulin mansion was surrounded by a sculpted iron fence with a metal gate. Grace pressed the call button.

  “Oui?”

  “Monsieur de Moulin?”

  The man on the line explained he was Monsieur de Moulin’s major-domo. In French Grace explained who she was, that she was working on a biography of Elena Craig. There was at first a long silence. She could hear him breathing through the speaker system.

  “Do you have permission from Elena Craig for this book?”

  “Of course. I can tell you more about that if you and Monsieur de Moulin permit me.”

  The gate buzzed open. An elderly man in a pair of slacks that seemed cut for him, a perfectly white shirt, and a black unbuttoned cardigan sweater opened the door.

  “Madame Elliott?”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “I only pretended to be my major-domo. It’s his day off. I am alone.” He had made no move to invite her in. “Did Elena speak of me?”

  When Grace shook her head, he smiled with disappointment and looked away.

  “How did you find out about me?”

  “Through the archives, in Prague.”

  “Ah, at the Institute?”

  “Yes, monsieur.”

  “I would have thought they’d removed it, along with everything else.”

  “They?”

  Jean-Yves de Moulin looked at her for some time, with his hands behind his back. “Your accent. Québécoise?”

  “I guess so, monsieur. I’m American but I’ve lived a long while in Montreal.”

  “Do you have a document, some proof, that Elena wants me to speak to you?”