by Alex Archer
“I’ve got things to do,” Annja said, dropping her napkin on the table. “I’m sure you’ve got enough here to entertain yourself.” She looked meaningfully toward the waitress, who in turn was pretending to look busy.
“I’m sure I can keep myself entertained for a few hours. After all, we’re in a hotel. Lots of bedrooms.”
“Just spare me the gory details.”
3
Annja was itching to get out and about, to do something, see something, anything that would take her mind off the nagging guilt.
She picked up the research on the golem, skimming it without finding any inspiration in the dry text.
She needed an angle.
That was what made stories work.
A human element. Something…different. Fresh. Something that would make the whole thing a little more interesting. If she couldn’t do that, maybe there was a second story from Prague she could stitch together to make something that might work.
The rack at the back of the desk held a well-thumbed collection of tourist brochures with dull photographs of landmarks and sites to visit in and around the city. Some of those brochures probably dated back to the Charter 77 revolution. A few of the landmarks were too obvious. They offered the shots of buildings that appeared in every holiday brochure and website about the city. They offered little of real interest to her. She didn’t want to simply retread the footsteps of well-known history, especially with the added pressure on this segment from the suits. To be perfectly honest, it was bad enough that the golem was so ingrained in the psyche of the city that she couldn’t find anything to say that hadn’t already been said. It was the kind of myth that pushed all the other folk tales to one side. There was only room for one fantastic beast here. But surely that in itself should have helped her? It made the less well-known legends more appealing, didn’t it?
Maybe.
If she could find one worth telling.
And with that thought it was as if something had clicked inside her head.
She had found something to search for even if she had no idea what it was.
This might be the golem’s city, but there had to be a more fascinating story beneath it, something better, in a city as old as Prague. She’d come across an epigram in her notes: Your problem, city, is that you have no soul. She couldn’t recall where she’d come across it, but she liked it.
Annja pondered the notion of going out to Sedlec, in the Kutná Hora suburb, to check out the ossuary. There was a building with a story to tell—a church dating back eight hundred years, with upward of seventy thousand corpses exhumed, their bones used to decorate the chapels. Chandeliers of bones, garlands of skulls, an altar consisting of every single bone from the human body, monstrances fashioned from childlike skeletons and the Schwarzenberg coat of arms, also executed in bone. It was like nowhere else on Earth. That a half-blind monk had done the exhumation five hundred years ago was the stuff of macabre fairy tale, rather like the bone sculptures of the carpenter František Rint, who was behind the decor. Could she somehow marry that in with the stories of the golem? A made man against a backdrop of a quite literally man-made chapel? It would provide an incredible visual for the live broadcast, she realized. It was a possibility.
She stuffed a handful of the leaflets into her bag and headed out with a little more of a spring in her step than when she’d come back into the room.
Even without consulting the street map she’d picked up from reception, she knew that there were any number of places she could start looking for her story that didn’t involve heading out to the ossuary. The most obvious was the city’s Old Town.
A convenient signpost only a few yards from her hotel pointed her in the right direction. The streets were considerably more alive if not teeming with tourists. Give it another hour, though, and that would be an entirely different matter. She walked on, looking at the endless matryoshka dolls on display in the shop windows around her.
The traffic had started to build up toward the morning rush hour, but the way the city was constructed, most of it never entered the more pedestrianized center. Some of the wider boulevards with expensive designer-brand stores were lined with lush trees and lusher price tags while the narrower streets were snarled up with people trying to take shortcuts. That was another legacy of cities first built before the invention of the internal combustion engines; some survived by keeping the traffic out of town as much as possible while others allowed developers to gradually change the landscape. Prague, it seemed, wanted to be the best of both worlds, but just might be the worst.
She turned onto Karlova Street and kept walking.
A delivery bicycle hopped onto the curb to pass a stationery van delivering parcels. Annja had to step out of the way, ducking into the deep doorway of a building. There was no point in yelling at the cyclist’s back; he was already half a street away. No one was hurt, nothing was broken. An impatient car—a big black shiny SUV—behind the van sounded its horn. The van driver showed no sign of moving for the time being. He climbed out of the cab and gave a wave that, while it was meant to say Bear with me, I’ll only be a moment, came across more like Screw you, I was here first.
Annja realized he was heading straight toward her, package in hand.
She stepped aside to let him get to the door, catching sight of the confused expression on the man’s face, and guessed he’d thought she’d come down to take the delivery from him.
“Sorry,” she said as she let him ring the bell.
He just nodded, obviously uncomfortable with the foreign language.
It was an unassuming little archway that promised the internet, a hair salon and a tobacco shop farther inside. There was a face carved into the keystone above the arch. As she stood on the sidewalk, she read the sign on the door. Kepler Museum.
She’d heard of Kepler, of course. He’d been a key figure in the seventeenth century scientific revolution, with his breakthroughs in the understanding of planetary motion providing the groundwork for Isaac Newton’s gravitational theory.
She was still trying to trawl her memory for anything she could remember about Kepler when the door opened. A middle-aged woman appeared on the doorstep to take the parcel. She signed his clipboard, then looked up at Annja, obviously unsure what she was doing loitering in the museum’s doorway.
She was still looking at her when the man slammed the door on his cab and gunned the engine, much to the relief of the waiting line of vehicles that snaked down the length of Karlova Street.
“Hello,” Annja said.
“Ah, hello,” the woman replied. “I’m sorry, but we do not open for another hour.”
She took a step out from under the archway to look up and down the street, rather like some wartime spy looking for a tail. Annja couldn’t help but smile to herself at the image. Maybe being in Eastern Europe was beginning to rub off on her way of thinking.
The traffic began to move again, following the van down Karlova Street toward the wider roads that waited beyond.
There was no one else on foot.
“You’re welcome to come inside, if you don’t mind the old house being a little on the chilly side. We seldom get visitors so keen they’re standing outside waiting for us to open.”
“Thank you,” Annja said, offering a smile, happy to play the excited tourist rather than correct the woman’s assumption. The entirety of her plan today was to follow the whims of the universe. If this was where the wind blew her, to this door in this part of town, then this was where she needed to be. How she got here, by accident or design, didn’t matter.
She followed the woman inside.
The air was a good ten degrees colder on her skin than it had been outside.
The woman disappeared through a doorway along the corridor, the old wood-and-glass paneled door swinging closed for a moment before she opened it again. She wedged a rubber stop under it to prevent it from swinging closed again.
“Please,” the woman said, beckoning Annja into her sm
all office where papers and files covered every inch of the two desks. “Would you like coffee? I find that I can’t do anything until I’ve had at least my second cup of coffee in the morning. That is, unless you’d be happier taking a look around yourself?”
“Actually, it’s been one of those days already, so I could use a decent cup of coffee. And then, if you’re willing, I’d love it if you showed me around,” Annja said.
“Then coffee and the grand tour it is.”
The woman busied herself with an expensive coffee machine.
Annja picked up one of the brochures from the pile that lay on the top of the filing cabinet. It was newer than the ones she’d seen in her hotel room, but offered much the same information. It was hard to imagine that the glossy paper produced all that many additional visitors. But then not all tourists were as jaded and world-weary as she’d been feeling recently.
Looking at the brochure didn’t inspire any great sense of adventure, though, and surely that was how you sold history? You made it come alive and feel real. This one offered little other than the fact that Kepler had worked in the city between 1600 and 1612, and was written in five different languages—though not well, it seemed, in any of them—beneath a reproduction of the portrait that was set in the keystone above the arch outside. There were a few pictures of the exhibits, as well. The flipside provided a small street map with an arrow pointing to the museum’s location, which, given that she was already standing in the middle of it, was fairly redundant. That said, Annja wasn’t sure she would have been able to find the small museum on the basis of the map alone, even though her hotel was only a few streets away.
“It doesn’t give a lot away, does it?” the woman said with a beaming smile on her face. She handed Annja a mug that bore the same portrait. She wondered idly how the astronomer would have felt to know his face had become a brand. “But then, we wouldn’t want too many people banging down the door in search of some Holy Grail or other. We like it just as it is.”
If it was good enough for the woman, it was good enough for Kepler himself, and that meant it was good enough for Annja.
“So, tell me, what brought you to our doorway? Do you have a special interest in Kepler? Or is it going to rain?”
Annja smiled at that.
“Perhaps I should explain,” she began. She fished out a business card from her bag. She handed it over. The woman looked as if she was being offered confirmation that they were receiving a surprise visit from the tax man, but eventually her expression lightened.
“Annja Creed,” she said. “Chasing History’s Monsters.”
It never ceased to amaze Annja when she came across people outside the mainland United States who’d heard of the show.
“I’m afraid I’ve never seen the program,” the woman said, piercing that particular bubble apologetically. “But my sister lives in New York and her son loves it. He talks about it every time I speak to him. You’ve made quite an impression on him, but then, he is a teenager.” Her grin was knowing.
“Do you think I could get you to sign something to send to him? He would be absolutely thrilled.”
“Of course,” Annja replied.
The woman looked around for a piece of paper, then decided it might be more fun if Annja signed one of the museum’s brochures. She was more than happy to oblige. It wasn’t exactly a hardship to send her best wishes to the budding archaeologist, and it gained the woman’s gratitude. She had no idea if there was a story here, but if anyone was likely to be able to help her find it, it was the curator.
“So are you thinking about doing a program about Kepler?” Her brow furrowed for a moment, seeming to realize something. “I would never have thought anyone would consider him a monster.”
“Unless you know some deep, dark secrets,” Annja said. “I’m in Prague to make a segment about Rabbi Loew and the golem, but I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly finding it inspiring.”
“Ah, yes, the golem. Now there was a proper monster,” she said. “In the oldest sense of the word. So what are you looking for?”
“Inspiration,” Annja said, painting as broad a canvas with the single word as she possibly could. “The city has to have more than one story to tell. If not here, then somewhere nearby. I am just following my nose. If I can’t find anything, then I’m not really sure what I’m going to do just yet. Maybe back to the golem if I can find a fresh perspective.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” the woman said. “It would probably be more than my job’s worth to help you if you wanted to turn Kepler into a monster. After all, the whole purpose of the museum is to celebrate his life and work.”
“Fear not, you bought me with coffee.” Annja raised her cup as though toasting the astronomer, and took another gulp. “The show’s never been about tarnishing someone’s reputation, living or dead.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” the woman said, the concern that had begun to build up on her face melting away.
Which of course only served to make Annja wonder if that meant Kepler had a secret worth hiding. But that was just the way her mind worked.
“So, inspiration…”
“Indeed,” said Annja. “Inspiration.”
“Finish your coffee and I’ll give you the grand tour.”
Annja took another sip, surprised that the woman had already finished hers, and then offered the mug back with half of the black treacle still in the bottom.
“That’s the best part,” the woman said, taking it and putting it next to her own like paperweights atop the bundle of papers. “Let’s make a start, then, shall we?”
Annja followed her around, listening to one explanation after another. The woman was a wealth of information when it came to the twelve years Kepler had spent in the city. Annja didn’t hear anyone else enter the building during the hour they walked between display cases, moving from room to room. She wondered how many visitors the museum received every day. It was getting on toward lunchtime, or at least brunch, so the tourists were no doubt still enjoying a leisurely stroll around the town, waiting for the hour to chime and the figures of the astronomical clock to do their macabre dance come midday. Perhaps more would come by in the afternoon. Or had people stopped caring about men like Johannes Kepler and all that they had done to further humankind’s understanding of the world?
She listened attentively, and it was obvious that much of the talk was stuff the woman had learned by rote and recited many times each week. It covered most of Kepler’s scientific achievements and the contributions that his studies had made to the science of astronomy. It was interesting, but it wasn’t show material. She’d already begun to forget some of the opening facts and she hadn’t even walked out the door.
She concentrated on what the woman had to say about his involvement with the city itself, but there was very little of that in her prepared speech.
As they approached the end of the tour, Annja knew as much as anyone could possibly ever want to know about the astronomer, but there’d been nothing to send a shiver up her spine. Nothing that told her she was listening to a story that would be worth chasing.
“A few of the places connected to Kepler are still standing,” the woman said. “Obviously you’re standing in one of them, but there are a few others worth taking a look at, if you are interested.”
Annja said she was. “Where would you recommend?”
“You might like to take a trip out to Benátky nad Jizerou if you’re taking a tour of the area. It’s a small town, half an hour away. It was where Tycho Brahe was building his observatory when he invited Kepler to join him. I’ve no idea how much they have there, but the town and the castle are worth visiting.”
Annja had heard the woman mention Brahe several times as they walked through the exhibits. Like Kepler, Brahe had been an important figure in the study of the planets at the time. Although his name hadn’t left such a lasting global legacy, he had clearly been an instrumental figure in the foundation of Prague as a center for scientific
thought.
“I might just do that,” Annja said. “Thanks.”
They headed toward the door, making small talk as they took the wooden stairs back down to the street level. It had been an interesting way to pass an hour or so, but it hadn’t solved Annja’s problem, and as far as she could see there was nothing pointing her in the direction of the next story.
“It’s been lovely to meet you,” the woman said as they reached the door. She made a show of looking up and down the street and shaking her head. “I’m starting to think that you might be our only visitor today.”
“Things are that bad?”
“Worse,” she said.
“How come?”
Annja’s first thought was that the place wasn’t making itself visible enough. After all, it was hidden away, and failing to appeal to the young. But then Prague was more commonly thought of as a party city where visitors could leave behind the consequences of their actions, not the kind of place you came to soak in the legacy of almost-forgotten scientists. That being the case, no amount of glossy brochures or clever marketing gimmicks would help.
She’d jumped to the wrong conclusion.
“It’s the murders,” the woman said. “You can hardly blame people for keeping away, I suppose. Who wants to go wandering around when people are getting murdered right outside their front doors? So, we struggle, and if the police don’t find the killer soon, it will be too late for some of us.”
“Is it really that bad?” Annja asked.
She’d been in Prague nearly a week and had been so wrapped up in her own problems she hadn’t even noticed. That was what Garin meant about living in the real world for a while.
She avoided mentioning just how close she might have come to the killer, hoping that the woman would fill in some of the details Garin had hinted at over breakfast.
“Oh, yes. There have been several of them. Poor homeless people found dead in alleyways and parking lots. Some huddled in doorways, their blankets still drawn up under their chins as if they were just sleeping.” The way the woman talked about it, it sounded like there were far more than four dead bodies that had been accounted for.