Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street

by Heda Margolius Kovály

  “Listen, Helena, tomorrow’s my last day of meetings. You’re the only one there with any brains. Will you talk to Janeček for me? He won’t take it so hard coming from you. Try to be tactful, but make sure you get the message across. Either he does his job right or I find a replacement. There’s plenty of projectionists out there, and good ones too. You think he drinks? Take a look around the booth, if you don’t mind. I’m sure if he’s got any bottles up there, he’ll clear them out before I get back. All right, thanks for handling this. I’ll give you a call back tomorrow.”

  As soon as someone flatters you for your brains, you know trouble’s coming. Marie could get through to Janeček much better and quicker than I ever could. What did brains have to do with it? But the manager had asked me, and when the boss told us to do something, we jumped. It never even crossed my mind to tell her no.

  The manager was so self-assured she didn’t even hide the fact that she was over forty. Though she easily could have. She was still a knockout, and the way she dressed, when she crossed the street, every eye was glued to her, as tubby Ládinka, our homeliest usher, said with a sigh every time. The boss’s husband was a famous surgeon, and the looks he gave her after twenty years of marriage were the kind most gals only get about two months before their wedding and three months afterward. She didn’t work for the money, of course. She did it because she felt like it, so every door was open to her and people fell all over themselves to get in her good graces. Everything she did was like some precious gift to the world; for her, the cinema wasn’t the daily grind it was for the rest of us working stiffs, for whom the job was just a way to earn a living. But in spite of the gap between us, in spite of the boss’s imported dresses and the big shiny car waiting for her out in front of the cinema every night, most of us didn’t envy her. Somehow she gave the impression it was all in the natural order of things. People tend to think of happiness like a cake: if one person gets a bigger slice, it means less for everyone else. But our boss seemed to be one of those creatures that can only exist in a state of happiness and prosperity, like a deep-sea fish that can only survive at the bottom of the ocean and anywhere else it would die.

  If it was true, as I’d always believed, that life was like a game of bridge—to win, you needed to know the rules and how to play the game, but you also had to be dealt a decent hand—then the boss got all the trumps. But besides that, or maybe in spite of it, she was a wise woman, and fair, and all of us ushers were grateful for that, so we bent over backwards to do what she asked. Which was why right now I was obediently trotting down the hall to that ugly gray door, even though it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do.

  If only Janeček weren’t such an oddball. The only person he was on friendly terms with was Josef, Marie’s eight-year-old nephew, her sister Žofie’s son. Žofie worked shifts in a factory, so Josef came to see Marie practically every day. And of course for a boy like him a film projector was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It was just “Hi, Marie,” and whoosh, off he went, up the stairs to the booth. It was good for the kid. At least he wasn’t just loafing around, and he might even learn something useful. The two of them got on surprisingly well. Janeček never talked down to him either, always spoke to him man to man. He must’ve been a good person, at heart, to like kids like that.

  Well, here we go.

  I opened the door without knocking to find Janeček standing there, leaning against the wall. I hoped he wasn’t drunk. Better get this over with quick.

  “Hello, Mr. Janeček. The boss called to say the conference won’t wrap up till tomorrow. She heard what happened yesterday and wanted to know if you could explain.”

  Janeček didn’t even blink, just stared at a dusty table littered with a half-eaten roll, a dirty rag, a big pair of scissors for cutting film, some empty movie reels, and assorted other junk. Strange little cubbyhole, I thought uneasily. I’d go off my rocker in here after a week. Murky light, rickety floorboards, dirt on every surface. Janeček acted like he didn’t even notice. Must have a pretty good hangover. He looks like death warmed over. Jesus, I’ve got to get out of here, this guy gives me the creeps. Did he even hear what I said? Why isn’t he answering? Maybe he’s too upset.

  “Try not to take it too hard, Mr. Janeček. These things happen. Just let me know what to tell the boss when she calls back.”

  Janeček kept his lip buttoned.

  “After all, it’s not a catastrophe, right? I mean sure, you made a mistake, but it can happen to anyone. It’s not a matter of life and death.” I forced a laugh. What was I babbling?

  Janeček gazed blankly past me at the wall. Finally he dropped his eyes back to the cluttered tabletop and snapped: “You tell the boss this. Tell her anyone can make a mistake. We wouldn’t want anything worse to happen. And tell her I can guarantee it’ll never happen again. You make sure you tell her that. Tell her it’ll never happen again, I guarantee.”

  “Well, all right. In any case I’m sure she’ll want to speak with you when she gets back. Just be careful from now on. And forget about it, you know? It’s not as if someone got shot.”

  Thank God I’m out of there, I thought as I left Janeček in the projection room.

  I nodded to the box-office girl and unhooked the rope barring access to the stairs. I walked downstairs and turned down the hall toward the staff cloakroom to change into my uniform. Even before I reached the door, I could already hear the voices inside, cackling and chattering over each other like barnyard hens.

  Good lord, at it again with the nasty gossip. Another one of those days.

  I opened the door. Marie stood in the middle of the tiny room, her eyes red, with bags underneath so big you could put groceries in them. She was sobbing at the top of her lungs, a man’s handkerchief bunched in her hand. Whenever she had a serious cold, or a serious heartache, she used a handkerchief left behind by one of her ex-lovers. The other ushers stood in a circle around her, mouths agape.

  “For God’s sake, girls, what’s going on in here?” I said. “It’s half past two, you should be out on the floor, we’ll be opening the doors soon.”

  “You’re not gonna believe it,” Líba said. “Marie’s nephew is missing!” The whole commotion started back up again.

  “Will all of you just shut up for a minute? Now tell me, Marie, what happened?”

  “Well,” Marie whimpered, “Žofie had a shift yesterday afternoon, so her boy Josef said he was comin’ over here. Sometimes I don’t feel like draggin’ him all the way over the bridge to Žofie’s and makin’ the trip back home again, so he just brings his schoolbag with him, sleeps over at my place, and goes straight to school in the morning. So when yesterday he was a no-show, I just figured he went to stay at the Musils’, since he’s friends with their son, little Petr, from school, and his mom works at the factory too, so when she’s home sometimes she takes the boys, and when Žofie’s got the morning shift Petr comes over to her place. So, like I said, I figured Josef was at the Musils’ and Žofie figured he was with me.”

  “So but this morning . . .” tubby Ládinka jumped in. Of all the girls she had the lowest tolerance for awkward moments of silence. “This morning Žofie calls Marie here—”

  “—and she says, Hi, Marie, thanks for takin’ my boy last night. You know if he got his math homework done? And I say, What’re you talkin’ about? Josef never came over, I thought he was with the Musils. And she says, Jesus, are you serious? Anna’s got a sore throat and dropped Petr off at her sister’s, so where could my boy be? She goes tearin’ over to school and no sign of him there. She already called the police. Nobody’s seen the kid since yesterday afternoon. Last one to lay eyes on him was Vejvodová, in the food mart ’cross the street. She says he stopped in around half past one for an ice cream bar, and his schoolbag’s still at home.”

  “That isn’t entirely correct, Miss Vránová,” said a voice, and everyone turned to see a powerfully
built, tan-faced man in a dark suit with a silver crew cut standing in the door. His eyes, round and bright, stood out against his dark skin like the opening in the lens of an old-fashioned camera. He wasn’t tall, but his frame filled the doorway.

  He took a step inside. “I’m Captain Nedoma,” he said, pausing before he went on. “Miss Šulcová saw the Vrba boy in here yesterday afternoon, just before two. Right upstairs here, at the snack bar. He bought another ice cream.”

  The silence was so complete you could hear everyone breathe.

  Then tubby Ládinka stammered: “But, but, the box office girl doesn’t even come in till two. The only one here before then is . . .”

  “That’s right, normally there’s only one person here before two p.m. We’ve informed your manager. They’re driving her over from headquarters right now. The Horizon will be closed for today, but don’t anyone go anywhere. You can have a seat in the smoking lounge. Comrade Dolejš here will wait with you. Miss Vránová, you stay here.”

  He jerked his head into the hallway and a blond beanpole of a man emerged from behind him with a badly healed broken nose and a suspicious bulge in his jacket.

  We marched single file out of the staff cloakroom and—right face, hut!—turned into the smoking lounge. The beanpole settled in on a hard chair in the corner, looking as if he planned to spend the rest of his life there.

  All of us lit up as if on command, even the girls who didn’t normally smoke. The folds under tubby Ládinka’s chin started trembling. Mrs. Kouřimská turned her back to the officer, crossed herself, folded her hands in her lap, and shut her eyes.

  Marie, our resident authority on matters of love, had this to say about Mrs. Kouřimská: “She’s livin’ proof of how stupid guys are. Look at her: not a lick of makeup, sweaters faded and washed out, skirts worn through at the seat, and still looks like she just stepped off a pedestal at that whatchamacallit in Paris, the Loover. Ever since she got widowed, though, she’s been all on her own. Just sits out in the park on Žofín every night in summer, watchin’ the young lovers neck out the corner of her eye.”

  It was true. Even at fifty Mrs. Kouřimská radiated the kind of eternal beauty you don’t see too much in this world, so it tends to scare people off. It was unfamiliar, almost mysterious. None of us would ever have dreamed of calling her “Karla.” We treated her with respect, and called her “missus,” the same as the customers.

  Sitting in the smoking lounge at the Horizon with the door shut, you couldn’t hear anything from the next room over, let alone from upstairs. We thought it was impossible, but we perked up our ears all the same, sitting on the edge of our seats. It felt like something might happen at any moment—maybe Josef would come bursting in, laughing about how scared we all looked and, boy, did he put one over on us, or suddenly there might be a scream or a gunshot. When you’re that wound up, you always expect some kind of loud noise, something to match your inner tension, to balance it out and calm you down so the earth can settle back into its regular rotation.

  But the only thing that happened was the manager walked in, pale and on the verge of fainting, followed by the man with the silver crew cut. They said we could all go home now. And that was that.

  There wasn’t a trace of Marie in the cloakroom, and a bunch of cops in uniform stood at the top of the stairs. The door to Janeček’s cubbyhole was propped open, and inside, two handyman types in plainclothes were bent over the floor. Next to them sat a stack of pried-up floorboards, the same ones I’d felt wobble under my feet a few hours earlier.

  The next day it was all over the papers:

  Twenty-eight-year old Jiří Janeček, previously convicted for sexual offenses, lured eight-year-old Josef Vrba into the projection booth at the Horizon Cinema and attempted to sexually assault him. When the boy resisted, the suspect stabbed him to death with a pair of scissors for splicing film and hid the body under the floor. The suspect, who was just released from prison five months ago, did not resist arrest. The boy’s mother had a nervous breakdown and is currently receiving treatment in the hospital.

  Our manager may not have had a breakdown herself, but she sure came close. She called me into her office and brewed me a cup of coffee with her very own two hands.

  “My God, Helena, forgive me! I sent you in there with that insane killer and the whole time he had a dead child under the floor and heaven knows what was going through that head of his when you—he could’ve . . . Lord have mercy! And poor little Josef, such a nice boy, always so cheerful . . .”

  We sat together a good long while, crying into our coffee.

  Twenty-nine years ago, by some terrible accident, two cells that should never have met joined to create something that should never have existed—a little slip of nature, happens all the time. And as those cells divided and grew and multiplied, that little discrepancy crystallized inside them. Maybe it was something you could see. Maybe a little black dot, the size of the head of a pin, and if I were a brain surgeon I could point to it with the tip of my scalpel and say to my assistant: “There, you see? That tiny spot on the cortex? That’s the death of Josef Vrba, age eight, of Prague.” So you see, we can’t blame Mr. Janeček. He wasn’t any more responsible than the pair of scissors he used to commit the awful crime. The whole thing was caused by that little dot on his brain.

  I went home. Home at this point was a studio flat I had received in a swap with the Součeks. They took our two-room flat and threw in a few thousand extra, which kept me afloat the first few weeks, till I landed myself a job.

  All in all, I made out all right. I had a decent place, a job that paid. Not much, but I got by. I might have been hard up, but Karel was even worse off—not to mention Žofie. I couldn’t complain. There’s so much suffering in the world and everyone’s suffering looks different, but it’s always the same story in the end: life just glides along, until all of a sudden one day everything goes off the rails.

  Karel worked in the Department of Economic Planning. We’d only been hitched two years, and loved each other madly. I mean we still did now, but it was so good for us back then, maybe too good. We were deaf and blind to everything wrong around us. Like a pair of those spiders that carry air down underwater from the surface, bubble by bubble, and attach it to a plant or a rock. Then when the bubble gets big enough, they just move inside it and live there, all nice and cozy, and the air and the water, the two elements, combine to form a wall that reflects the inside like a mirror and they can’t see out of it.

  Karel had a secretary—nice gal, a bit on the shy side. One Monday morning the previous September, she walked in with a letter for him to sign that had five mistakes. “Jana, dear, is there something wrong?” Karel asked. Then he looked at her and saw that she was glowing all over. Like a little bowlegged ball of sunshine standing there in front of him.

  “I’m sorry,” Jana said. “I’ll do it over. My mind just isn’t on work today.”

  “What is it?” Karel asked.

  “Well, I guess I can tell you,” she said. “My boyfriend just flew in from out of town.”

  “Why, that’s great,” Karel said. “You kids enjoy yourselves.”

  That night we were at home watching TV—we used to love just sitting around like that, the two of us—and Karel said to me: “Jana always was such a mousy little thing. You know, it almost made me feel sorry for her. Forget the damn dictation. I’m just glad to see she’s actually got some woman in her.”

  If only I’d kept my trap shut, but no: “Why don’t you invite her and her beau out to the cottage?” I said. “The weather’s so beautiful. Maybe they’ve got nowhere to get away to for the weekend.”

  “You’re right,” Karel said. “Besides, everyone at the office is always saying how standoffish I am.”

  So the next day Karel went in and invited Jana and her beau out to our cottage on Sunday. Jana got all excited, said they’d be coming by motorcycle, and
asked, By the way, how did they get to our place anyway?

  “Oh, it’s easy,” Karel said. He took a sheet of paper with official letterhead and drew her out a map. “Now look, you go straight down Benešovská till you see this sign here for Ještěnice. Branch off to the left there, go straight down the local road, then over the bridge, and a little ways after that, on the right, you’ll see two big buildings, right here. Past them’s an intersection, take a left, and about two kilometers down the road, branch off again, this time to the right, then go down that, through the woods, like this, and after the woods you’ll come to a village. On the left is a grocery store. Go around that, then the road curves back again toward the river. After that just keep going straight till you see the cottages. Here, I’ll mark it for you: one, two, three. And that last one, the one that isn’t finished yet, is ours. You’ll be able to tell, since I’ll be out there, covered in dust, laying down the concrete for the sidewalk. So try not to step in it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Jana said. “My boyfriend’s going to love it. We’ll bring a bottle of something.”

  But they didn’t bring anything. On Friday Jana didn’t show up for work and Karel got word that she and her beau had been picked up by the police. It was a lousy weekend. We never did make it out to the cottage, and the sidewalk still wasn’t done, since they came for Karel first thing Monday morning. They took him away and combed the whole place, turned the flat upside down, why and what for they didn’t say.

  Ten days later, a Wednesday, I got fired from the publishing house. I went home and sat in a daze, until somebody rang the bell and I opened the door to two dapperly dressed men with kissers like carved wood. They just flashed their IDs and said to come with them. I was about to ask for how long, but then thought better of it and instead said I had to go grab my handbag. One of the spooks slipped in behind me and kept an eye on my fingers as I dropped my wallet into my handbag along with my keys and a comb. A sudden chill came over me, so I went to the dresser for my wool vest, feeling his eyes on me at every step. He didn’t stop gaping at me as I took the sweater from the drawer. I had half a mind to tell him I needed to go to the bathroom, but then realized he would probably just follow me right in. As they escorted me down the stairs, one in front, one behind, it reminded me of the fairy tale: “Mist ahead and to the rear, let no one see, that I may hear.” And wouldn’t you know it, we had to run into Mrs. Bendová, coming home from doing the shopping. She put her bags down and stared so hard that I was surprised those owly eyes of hers didn’t fall right out of her head. Just my luck. Five minutes later the whole building probably had me put away for ten years, assuming they hadn’t just sent me straight to the gallows.