The Kingfisher Secret

by AnonYMous

  “Monsieur Straka has many visitors.”

  While he phoned, the doorman gave them two white towels to dry their hair. The towels smelled faintly of a swimming pool.

  On the way to the elevator Grace told William more about Straka: how he was polite and formal, a minor donor and major fundraiser in the dusty European arts in Montreal. His apartment was on the top floor, and as the elevator rose slowly, Grace prepared her recorder. “Somehow he got out of Czechoslovakia when she did, the hardest and most dangerous time to leave. And the files on him and Elena must be missing for a reason. I can only assume he had a government role before the fall of communism, a role worth concealing. What’s your theory?”

  “He wasn’t in the Cibulka. I don’t know where that takes us.”

  Josef Straka stood at his open door. His white hair was freshly combed and he wore a crisp dress shirt with a black cardigan, tan chinos, a pair of slippers. “Madame Elliott.”

  “Monsieur.”

  “What a pleasure to see you again.”

  William said something in Czech and Straka agreed. They both translated for Grace. The snow in Montreal is real snow, unlike the nonsense that falls in Prague. Then Straka performed his Gilles Vigneault impression, singing, “Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.”

  Grace translated the classic Québécois song for William. “My country is not a country. It’s winter.”

  In English it sounded banal.

  They chuckled politely and shook hands while Straka looked at Grace’s notebook and recorder. He had not yet invited them in. Through the open door, Grace could see bright white walls and dark wood floors and cabinetry, statues and abstract art. Through the big windows of his expensive condo, snow whorled and danced.

  “What can I do for you?” Straka asked at last.

  “I am writing a book about Ms. Craig, her life story.”

  He crossed his arms, the smile disappeared but he did not look surprised. “She will not allow this. It will not be permitted.”

  “Permitted?” she said.

  “How does this affect your role at the National Flash, Madame Elliott?”

  This was his way of telling her he knew she’d been fired. Grace turned on the recorder. “I was surprised to learn that you and Ms. Craig were once married, Monsieur Straka. I had never heard that before, despite all of our conversations and all the interviews she has given.”

  “This is false. We were never married.”

  “But in the Montreal Herald, Elena herself said—”

  “You were at the paper, yes? Please show me what you discovered.”

  “How did you hear we were just at the paper, monsieur?”

  Straka looked at his watch, evidently keen to get rid of them.

  “Well, as you know, there’s nothing in the archives.” Grace unlocked her phone and opened the email from Jean-Yves de Moulin. “But I do have an image.”

  Straka removed his glasses to look at the article. “That’s obviously a fake.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I lived here at that time. Elena lived here too. We weren’t married. Someone created it to mislead you. Nine-year-olds can be graphic designers now.”

  “There were hits, in the Herald system, for articles. Not just this one but lots of others. But the articles themselves have been removed.”

  “Fake hits, to mislead you.”

  William had his own notepad out now. “We went to the provincial archives as well, Mr. Straka. It showed there were files once about your marriage to Ms. Craig, and that they too are gone.”

  “There never were any files about my marriage to Madame Craig because we were never married.” Straka’s angry voice boomed in the hall. “We were childhood friends. To the best of my knowledge, the government of Quebec is not interested in such matters.”

  “How did you escape Czechoslovakia?”

  Straka turned slowly back to Grace and his smile returned, though this one was different from his welcome-weather-song smile. “Carefully.”

  “Can you expand on that?”

  “No, I mean you, Madame Elliott. Tread carefully.”

  “Monsieur Straka, Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist anymore. Surely it doesn’t matter how you left and came to Canada. It must have been terribly difficult and dramatic. All of the razor wire and the mines, the border guards with machine guns, the dogs.”

  “This is mythology, Madame Elliott. Defecting was actually quite easy.”

  “Were you working for the StB?”

  Straka stepped back and reached for the door to close it.

  “Was the marriage part of the strategy?” Grace stepped forward to keep the door open with her foot. “I can’t make that part out. How did it benefit you or Elena, to be married?”

  “Enough, Madame Elliott.”

  “Unless you were in love.”

  “We looked for you in the Cibulka,” said William.

  Veins had popped on Straka’s forehead. As furious as he was, he also seemed to Grace a touch defeated. There was a new slouch about the way he stood with his hand on the heavy door. “You disgust me, the way you try to smear good people. I’ve given so much to this city and this country. I have hurt no one.”

  “I’ll get the story,” said Grace. “Depend on it. You can either control your place in it by giving us an interview or not.”

  He took a deep breath and Grace thought for a moment that he was about to invite them in.

  “You will not get the story,” he said, reaching down and turning off her recorder. Then he whispered so quietly she could only hear its edges. “They’ll kill you first.” He turned. “Goodbye, Madame Elliott.”

  William had already backed into the hall. Again, Grace stopped the door as he tried to close it. “Who are they?”

  Straka took a step forward and placed his hands on her shoulders, like he was going to lean in to tell her a secret. Then he shoved her into the hall. She fell back into William and rather gracelessly landed on her tailbone.

  The door slammed.

  It was, for a while, eerily quiet in the hall. Someone was using an electric drill. William eased Grace up and she righted the messed-up pages of her notebook. They stared at his door for a while, as though it were a dangerous object, and then Grace walked across the hall, pressed the down button on the elevator.

  “Grace?”

  “Yes?”

  The elevator doors opened. “Is it normal to be told you could be…killed for writing a story?”

  Grace shook her head. Even in her jacket she was cold. As they walked through the generous lobby of the Acadia, the doorman saluted them. “Madame Elliott? Monsieur Kovály?”

  “How does he know my name?” William whispered.

  The doorman gestured toward a man and a woman, both in black overcoats, standing up from the two chairs in the entrance hall. They were tall and fit, both of them with high cheekbones and skin the color of eggshells. “These two have been waiting for you.”

  33

  MLADÁ BOLESLAV, 1990

  As she stood over the grave of her father, her weeping daughter at her side, Elena watched her husband. The priest delivered the sermon in Czech, a language Anthony never bothered to learn: not even hello and goodbye, certainly not thank you. While in the beginning he always said her accent was cute, she knew he found the actual language coarse and disagreeable—the grunts of peasants, he called it. French was high class. Dutch and German sounded smart. The Slavic languages, which sounded all the same to him, were signs of a stunted culture, a stunted people. He would say this in front of her, in a crowd, at dinner. Present company excluded, sweetheart.

  Anthony did that thing with his lips, curled into scorn and despair, and looked down at the casket. Elena imagined what he was thinking—a good casket, the best casket money can buy in this fucked-up country. When he looked at the quarterly results of Craig International, especially these days, this was the face he made.

  Whatever he was thinking about, wit
h a few flakes of dry snow swirling around him, Elena was absolutely certain it wasn’t her father, it wasn’t Kristína, it wasn’t her.

  Kristína had spent every summer of her young life at her grandparents’ house on the river. Her grandfather was her father, far more than Anthony had been. Anthony was too busy to teach her anything, up until now, and wore it like a medal. She learns from my example, from my business, from my work, and that has to be good enough. Her father’s a great man, one of the greatest. You knew that when you married me. It’s why you married me.

  Why she married him.

  For years Elena had worried about her father, how he tortured himself. Petr Kliment believed he had sent his daughter, and therefore his granddaughter, into ruin. He said this to Jana, his wife. He said it to Elena.

  Had he said these things, these truths, to others? This is what had driven Elena from sleep. When the phone rang in the middle of the night, her heart would go wild with worry, certain he had said too much to the wrong people.

  Then it was over. Soon even the Soviet Union would dissolve. She was no longer a swallow. She was free. The dissident, Václav Havel, was now president of the federal republic. The new motto of the country was Pravda vítězí: truth wins. Then she would think of Danika and her own dark days, the culmination of her life, and nothing seemed true at all.

  Her first thought, when the Eastern Bloc began to fall apart a year ago, was that she could soon go home, take Kristína from Anthony and go home. Petr knew this plan. They had discussed it on a walk through the bush with Hektor, in the summertime, and he had been overjoyed. After twenty years of prison, his daughter could live a life of her choosing.

  No one could hurt them now.

  Kristína would be thirteen soon. Elena worried most of all that she would lose what Petr Kliment had taught her. Not, in Anthony’s words, to be a little communist but to care for the rhythm of life around her, for other people and the spirit in the woods, whatever God had been to earlier generations of Czechs.

  Elena was suddenly enraged, at her father’s grave, to think that Anthony had never bothered to come to Czechoslovakia to meet him.

  It had been more than a year since Elena had seen or heard from Sergei. She fantasized about them quietly trying and hanging him in the courtyard of a Russian state house, even though she knew there was no hanging a man like Sergei.

  She had stopped expecting the phone call about her father, and then it came. In New York, on the airplane, in her mother’s apartment, at the grave she could not stop thinking about her father’s strong heart. He was young!

  Jana was coming back to New York with them. Czechoslovakia was no place for her anymore, especially not now with people of stature under communism waking up in the middle of the night to bricks thrown through their windows. One of her mother’s friends, a party official in Prague, had been accosted by a group of other women. They had slapped and spat on her.

  Communism or capitalism had been irrelevant to Petr Kliment. No one had said a word against him. He died at sixty-three, putting up new shelves in his work shed. She imagined his final minutes, lying in the cold and dark.

  A heart attack was only a heart attack if the doctor said so. And the doctor had not come to the funeral.

  Beside her, Anthony sighed. It was too much for him, to listen to someone else speak—especially in Czech. The automotive division had never made money. They had reached the limits of what they could borrow and sometime in the next year or two they would have to begin selling off major assets. Management consultants from McKinsey had been called in to speak to the executive team, and Anthony called them cowards without imagination. He hated consultants and he hated banks. The deal with the Soviets, back in 1987, had fallen through despite all of her and Sergei’s careful work. Anthony hated following regulations in Long Island and New Jersey.

  “That’s the problem to solve in America, and not only for Craig,” he told the men from McKinsey. “We wouldn’t need so much fucking capital if you geniuses could figure out how to get around taxes and regulations. Soon we’ll be worse than Moscow. Elena: tell them what it was like to build a factory in Moscow!”

  She would start to tell them, and Anthony would interrupt. He could tell the story about all the dumb regulations in Moscow better, faster, and without an accent.

  “Ow, Mama.” Kristína looked up at her in her black Prada overcoat, her big eyes red from crying. She had been squeezing her daughter’s hand too hard.

  The priest stopped speaking.

  Anthony nodded with pretend sadness. “Finally.”

  Elena threw dirt on the coffin and so did Kristína. Anthony did too, conscious that a crowd was watching. Walking slowly to the black cars that would take them back to the hotel in Prague, Anthony put his arm around Elena.

  “Who gets to be in those mausoleum crypts, the little stone mansions?”

  “Before communism, whoever paid for them,” she said.

  “You know what, fuck it. I’ll have someone look into this. We can get one built for your dad, one of those light-colored ones like old churches. If we have to get him dug back up to put him in there, I say we go for it. What do you say? You don’t want people walking past and thinking Anthony Craig is cheap.”

  “It isn’t important,” Elena said.

  “You know what? I think it is.” He stopped her, turned her around, pointed to the distant hole in the ground where a small party of men was already shoveling. “We’re better than that.”

  The mausoleum crypts were off to the side, on what amounted to an avenue of dead rich people.

  “That’s where someone of his stature belongs, Elena.”

  “My dad never cared about stature.”

  “You do. We do. Let’s make sure he’s remembered as the right kind of man.”

  Kristína was on her own, speaking Czech with the priest. There would be a dour version of a wake in the rooftop restaurant of the Inter-Continental Hotel.

  They had killed her father. Elena was sure of it. Where would men like this hide? Men who knew how to find people anywhere?

  Anthony was not staying for the wake. He had chartered a plane to take him to Frankfurt, where he would meet with Deutsche Bank the next day. In the car he talked about how it was a great funeral but they had to build a beautiful mausoleum for Petr, with maybe enough room for old Jana when she died.

  “You design it, Elena.” Anthony sat with his chest out, like this mausoleum idea had brought her father back to life. “You tell me how you want it and it’s done. It is fucking done.”

  She sighed. “All right.”

  “A beautiful crypt that will last a thousand years. We can have a plaque on it: by the Anthony Craig family.”

  Kristína, who had been listening to the conversation, interrupted. “He’d like it better to be in the ground with the animals.”

  “Who teaches her to talk this way?” Anthony motioned toward Kristína with his thumb. “Is this what the kids learn every summer, here at commie camp?”

  “Dad!”

  At the hotel in Prague he had the porter load his bags into the car and he kissed Elena and his daughter. “Great funeral. You looked great. Kristína: gorgeous. Your hair is gorgeous like that. You saw the press was there, right? You don’t make eye contact when they take your picture. You look away and you look sad because that’s what people expect you to be, right? Sad at sad things and happy at happy things.”

  * * *

  —

  Two hours later, when the speeches were over at the wake, Elena led Kristína to the elevator, where a man in a dark suit and hat was waiting for them. She did not recognize him at first. He had gained even more weight and there were dark rings under his eyes.

  “I am so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Craig. Your father was a very good man.”

  She simply nodded, as though he were a stranger, and allowed him to place a slip of paper in her purse.

  Three hours later, when Kristína was asleep, Elena left the hotel. Sergei was
in a pew in the middle of St. Nicholas Church where no one would notice him.

  Elena slid in next to Sergei and for the next ten minutes, as he whispered plans at her, she dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands.

  “I want out.”

  “Yes. We know. And as you know, that isn’t how it works.”

  “I don’t care if that isn’t how it works, Sergei. As long as there was an StB and a KGB, I did what was required of me. I’m taking my mother to New York. You can’t threaten my father anymore.”

  Sergei sat back in his pew with half a smile.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Absolutely not. I visited him, last month. For some reason he was convinced—like you, Elenka—that it was over. That you were free of us. Your debts paid. You were leaving Craig, he said, and moving to Mladá Boleslav.”

  “And?”

  “Petr knew the rules, Elenka, and he benefitted from them. He lived a life almost no one in this country could have imagined. All because of you. And he betrayed you. I can’t tell you how many times I had to stop him from talking, protect him from himself. I was your father’s protector, all these years. But last month I had to tell him the truth. Nothing is over. It is only just beginning for you, for our Anthony. Petr did not take it well.”

  She stood up.

  “Elena, your father did not have a heart attack. The coward hung himself. Vrba did the right thing. She called me.”

  “You’re lying! And don’t call her that.”

  “You shouldn’t shout in a church.”

  Elena tried to slap him but he caught her arm at the wrist and squeezed. She tried to pry herself loose. “I’m leaving him. I’m finished.”

  “Oh Elenka.” Sergei took a deep breath and exhaled with a full smile, released her. “You and Anthony and your pretty Kristína, you’re finished when we say you’re finished.”

  34

  MONTREAL, 2016

  The woman was one of the most beautiful people Grace had ever seen, with creamy skin and clear green eyes, bright copper hair.

  “Mr. Kovály. Ms. Elliott. My name is Roberta McKee.” She gestured to the man next to her, in a camel cashmere coat. “This is Bradley Tebb.”