by Graham Brack
‘You should close your bag,’ she said. ‘There are a lot of sneak thieves around this area.’
The girl nodded her thanks and tried to close her bag, which was rather full.
‘Allow me,’ said Peiperová, who did not wait for agreement before pulling the zip shut.
‘Thank you,’ said the girl in heavily accented Czech.
‘Ah, you’re a foreigner! Where are you from?’
‘I am from Bosnia.’
‘Bosnia? You’re a long way from home. Do you work here?’
‘I’m sorry, I am in a hurry. I have no time to talk.’
‘That’s a pity. I have lots of time. I also have this.’ Peiperová showed her police badge. The girl looked very agitated. ‘I should ask to see your visa.’
‘I don’t have with me. I can bring to you.’
‘No, you can’t. You don’t have one, do you?’
The girl’s eyes filled with tears as she mutely shook her head.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t arrest you. But we need to talk. When are you due at work?’
‘At eight o’clock.’
‘Then we have time. Let’s go and have coffee together and you can answer my questions. Or we can go to the police station.’
‘Coffee is better.’
‘Coffee it is, then.’
Slonský rotated his notebook and squinted at the street sign. ‘He’s not Picasso, is he? This isn’t much of a map he’s drawn. But I think that’s the road we want.’
‘Should we call for backup, sir?’
‘Is that your favourite phrase, lad? You always want to call for backup. If you were in charge the entire police force would be following each other around. We might as well hold hands.’
‘I just thought he may have called ahead and they’ll be waiting in ambush for us.’
‘Navrátil, if he called ahead he’ll have told them to watch for your deft work with the penknife and they’ll all be cowering in corners cupping their groins.’
‘Or waiting to shoot me as soon as I step inside the door.’
‘Don’t be a pessimist. I haven’t got you shot yet, have I?’
There’s always a first time, thought Navrátil.
Slonský looked up at the facades of the buildings, and instantly spotted the old student hostel because it had a sign saying Student Hostel over the door. He climbed the steps and paused at the top. ‘This could be dangerous, lad, so make sure you stand to one side when you open the door.’
Navrátil tried turning the large brass knob which filled his hand. Surely small ladies’ hands would never be able to grasp it, he thought. The door creaked open and they stepped inside. A little kiosk stood against the wall to the right. The appearance of visitors came as a surprise to the man sitting there, who bounded to his feet and quickly put a black peaked cap on his head.
‘This is private property, gentlemen.’
‘We’re not planning to steal it. It won’t fit in our pockets,’ said Slonský. He waved his badge and put it away before the doorman had any chance to look at it. ‘Slonský, Acting Captain, and Officer Navrátil. You’re in luck — till the other day I was a lowly lieutenant, but you get the privilege of being raided by a proper officer. I want to speak to the girls you have here.’
‘Girls?’
‘Yes, girls. Men with lumps. You must have seen them around the place.’
‘I’ll have to ask the boss.’
The doorman picked up the telephone receiver to dial but Slonský quickly slammed his hand down on the rest and held it there. ‘Phone calls are expensive. Why don’t you make it later? When we’re gone, for example.’
‘The boss wouldn’t like that.’
‘The boss doesn’t get to choose,’ Slonský replied, keeping firm hold of the doorman’s wrist.
‘What do you want to see them for?’
‘We’d just like to check their visas. I’m sure they’re all in order, aren’t they?’
‘I really think I ought to call the boss.’
‘No, you really ought to call the girls. If we do you for shoplifting, we don’t let you ring a mate to put the stuff back on the shelf. Navrátil, send for a big wagon. A number of young ladies will be spending the evening with us.’
‘They’re due at work in a couple of hours,’ the doorman protested. ‘How can you have a strip club with no strippers?’
‘Better get practising,’ Slonský called over his shoulder as he bounded up the staircase. ‘It looks like you may have to fill in.’
Slonský told Navrátil to stand at the top of the stairs as he walked along the hallway banging on each door in turn and yelling ‘Out! Police!’ When he reached the far end he turned round and opened each door. Women in various stages of undress tumbled into the corridor, and he shepherded them towards Navrátil.
‘It’s as well you didn’t go in there, lad. Could have been too educational for a young man with a delicate upbringing. Now, ladies, let’s see your papers please.’
Amid the general consternation a brunette was pushed to the fore.
‘Please, we don’t have,’ she said.
‘No papers? Tut, tut. Then we may have to send you home.’
The brunette translated. It appeared that this declaration met with general approval, and several girls ran to pack bags.
‘Our passports are taken by bad men,’ the brunette explained. ‘They keep them so we cannot go.’
‘Are you all Bosnian?’ Slonský asked. There was some shaking of heads that illustrated that a couple of Croat girls were there, and at least one Montenegrin. The doorman appeared behind them.
‘Your van’s here. Can I come too?’
‘Why? Are your papers out of order?’
‘No, but if I come I won’t have to explain why I let you in and didn’t call the boss.’
Slonský lifted his hat and scratched his head in perplexity. ‘I suppose I’m becoming an old softie, but just this once. Get the girls in the van and hop in yourself.’
The girls quickly packed and ran to the van, throwing their bags in and climbing aboard amidst happy laughter, followed by the old doorman. A couple of the girls reached down to help him up, then Slonský closed the doors and patted the side to indicate that it could go.
‘I don’t know, Navrátil, there’s something wrong about people being happy to get locked up. The world’s changing, you know.’
‘Won’t their boss be straight round to spring them?’
‘Not if he doesn’t have papers. But in any case they’re not going to our station. I’ve told the driver to take them to Kladno. That should make it that little bit harder for their boss to get them out. And I’m sure Peiperová will be delighted to join us for questioning if it means she can drop in on her folks for a coffee and cake. Her mother does a very nice poppy seed cake, as I recall.’
The girl could hardly stop her hands shaking as she sipped her coffee. At first she declined a pastry, but Peiperová ordered a selection for them and was watching as her new acquaintance made short work of the plateful.
‘I’m Kristýna,’ said Peiperová, extending a hand. The Bosnian girl hurriedly wiped her sticky fingers on a napkin and shook it.
‘Daniela.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Daniela. I’m trying to get in touch with girls who work at the Padlock Club. Do you work there?’
Daniela shook her head vigorously. ‘No, I work at the Purple Apple.’
‘I don’t know that one,’ Peiperová confessed, though her knowledge of Prague’s club scene was hardly encyclopaedic.
Daniela cast her eyes down and chased a crumb round her plate reflectively. ‘It is … unusual place. It is club for women only.’
‘I see. Gay women?’
Daniela nodded. ‘But I am not such!’ she quickly added. ‘I don’t like to work there. But it is better than other job they give me.’
‘Other job?’
‘When I come to Prague they tell me there is no job as musician in orchestra. I play f
lute. Also piccolo.’
‘You’re a musician? But surely there are jobs in bands here?’
‘I don’t have papers. They don’t give them back when we cross border. And they took my flute. It is expensive to get another one. They tell me I have to be with men, or I can dance, so I dance for women.’ She gave a bitter half-laugh. ‘At least you don’t get a baby with women.’
‘Did someone you knew fall pregnant?’
Daniela nodded mutely.
‘A Bosnian girl?’
‘Yes.’
Peiperová believed she could guess the answer to the next question, but she asked it anyway. ‘What happened to her?’
Daniela’s eyes glistened with tears, and she wrapped a paper napkin around her hand as she pushed her knuckles into her mouth to stifle her crying.
‘She cut herself dead.’
‘She cut her wrists?’
‘Please — wrists?’
Peiperová mimed cutting her wrists with her knife, realising a little too late that the waitress was watching. She came running and grabbed the knife.
‘We don’t want that sort of thing in here,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to make a scene I shall call the police.’
Peiperová displayed her badge. ‘I am the police,’ she said.
‘Then you should know better,’ the waitress announced before flouncing off.
Slonský leaned back and opened the rear nearside door.
‘Hop in, lass. Got the coffee and pastries?’
‘There you are, sir.’
‘Spot of good fortune your being in a café when Navrátil called. Now, what did you find out?’
‘The girl Daniela doesn’t work at the Padlock Club. She works at the Purple Apple. She knew the girl who killed herself, sir. She says that although they work in different places, the Bosnian girls sometimes meet in the markets. She overheard the other girl — she’s called Milena, by the way — when they were out shopping and they spoke to each other. She met her again a couple of weeks later and said Milena looked awful. She had a bruise on her cheek and a cut on her hairline, and she looked like she hadn’t slept for days. She said two men had raped her and now she was pregnant. That was the last time Daniela saw her. She heard a couple of days later than Milena had cut her wrists.’
‘Did she know anything else that might help?’
‘She said Milena lived in a hostel somewhere.’
‘We know that, girl. That’s where we’ve just been.’
‘A women’s hostel? Without a woman officer?’
‘You can’t be in two places at once, lass. And Navrátil escaped unmolested, though it was a damn near-run thing. I blame those dimples when he smiles. You must have noticed them.’
Peiperová fired a glare at Navrátil as if he had been bestowing his affections on the whole of Czech womanhood. Since he was studiously inspecting the wing mirror, he failed to notice, which only annoyed her more.
‘Did she know who brought her here, Peiperová?’
‘She knew both Savović and Brukić, sir. She says Brukić came with the minibus and Savović was waiting here when they arrived. She says somewhere in Hungary they got out of the bus and were put into a truck full of tins of peaches. After a while they were allowed out to stretch their legs and go to the toilet by the roadside, then they had to get back in for the rest of the journey.’
‘By the roadside?’ said Navrátil. ‘Couldn’t they make a run for it?’
‘The men watched them,’ Peiperová snapped.
‘That’s disgusting,’ replied Navrátil. ‘How embarrassing for them.’
‘In the overall scheme of things, Navrátil, being watched while you have a pee probably comes a fair way down the list of nasty things that can happen to you compared with being beaten up and raped.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Navrátil agreed, ‘but it’s still wrong.’
Slonský eyed his assistant carefully. ‘Your obstinacy does you credit, lad. There’s such a thing as right and wrong and I was guilty of relativism. I should know, it was a regular complaint against me when the Communists were in charge. I kept arguing that maybe there was less theft in the Communist bloc than the West not because we were model citizens but because there was damn all to steal, and I got accused of inexact relativism. Plus cultural deviation, though I never quite knew what that was. And that’s despite a week in Brno at re-indoctrination camp.’
‘Re-indoctrination camp?’ parroted Peiperová.
‘Like Pioneer Camp but for bad boys. People like me who had forgotten that we were living in an earthly paradise. We had lessons on Marxist theory. There was a poster of Marx on one side of the blackboard, and a picture of Engels on the other side. I asked why we never got any lessons on Engelsian theory.’
‘And what was the answer, sir?’
‘I got taken outside and kicked a few times. And they took my soup off me at dinner time, but that was a blessing. Then I had a stroke of good fortune. The Central Committee of the Communist Party sent some bigwig down to see how the camp functioned, and he decided to speak to me. I said I was disappointed that we’d had no lectures on the important work of Engels. He asked if that was true, and the instructor was sacked when he heard that it was. I was sent back to duty as an exemplary student who had correctly identified the ideological deficiencies of a revisionist clique.’
‘What important work did Engels do then, sir?’ asked Navrátil.
‘I have no idea, and neither did the bigwig. But he thought he should have known, so he couldn’t ignore the fact that we hadn’t had it. There’s nobody as self-righteous as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’
They pulled off the highway and drove into Kladno. Peiperová had worked here before she moved to Prague and gave directions to the police station. Her old boss Sergeant Tomáš was standing by the front desk looking harassed.
‘Am I glad to see you!’ he declared. ‘That crew of cats has been yabbering away downstairs since they arrived. I have no idea what they’re going on about. Anyway, they’re all yours.’
‘Thanks for taking them in,’ said Slonský. ‘We wanted to get them somewhere where their pimps couldn’t reach them.’
‘I thought you said they were dancers?’
‘They are. But some of them are horizontal dancers, so to speak.’
Peiperová smiled broadly as Sergeant Tomáš welcomed her back.
‘How is Prague?’
‘Interesting, sir.’
‘Yes,’ said Slonský. ‘Your protégée has already made it to the heights of Acting Acting Captain.’
‘Really?’ said Tomáš. He motioned to them to go down to the cells, letting the young couple go first, then grabbed Slonský’s arm to hold him back as they followed. ‘Is there such a rank?’ he asked.
‘There must be,’ said Slonský. ‘She is one.’
Despite his insistence that this was a Prague operation, Tomáš readily joined in the processing of the girls and managed to find another female officer to help. Within a couple of hours they had collected names and addresses and taken something approaching a statement from each of them. Slonský and Navrátil had finished and rejoined Tomáš and Peiperová.
‘What happens now?’ asked Tomáš. ‘The cells aren’t big enough for fourteen of them. The doorman’s all right — he gets a cell to himself — but the women can’t all sleep in the other cell.’
‘Have you got a hotel in town?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s give them a call to see if they have a few rooms free. I’m sure we can beat them down on price at this time of night.’
‘Isn’t that going to be expensive, sir?’ whispered Navrátil. ‘Captain Lukas wouldn’t sign it off.’
‘No, but Acting Acting Captain Peiperová will. Especially if it means she can spend a night with her parents. Do they have a sofa?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then why don’t you pop off too and see the future in-laws? Take the car and come back for me in
the morning.’
‘Right, sir,’ beamed Navrátil.
Slonský had given the girls their instructions. ‘Dinner, then you go to your rooms and stay there. If anyone leaves their room they get taken back to the bad men in Prague. Understand?’
There was a lot of nodding and vociferous agreement with this plan.
‘Then at 07:30 tomorrow we all have breakfast. I’m sorry you didn’t have time to pack spare clothes…’
‘Yes, we pack,’ the brunette replied. ‘We have bags in the big van.’
A poor young waiter was sent out to help the doorman unpack the bags and return them to their owners. By the time this was done Slonský had decided he just had time for a beer with Tomáš before he turned in for the night too.
‘If you need some clean clothes I could raid the uniform store at the station,’ Tomáš offered.
‘No, thanks. I doubt you have anything that fits me. Prague never did.’
The waiter slid a large glass in front of each of them. Practised drinkers both, they caressed it with their eyes before taking a long slurp in appreciative silence.
‘That was worth waiting for,’ said Tomáš.
‘It’s a decent drop of beer,’ Slonský conceded. ‘Don’t you get told off for drinking in uniform?’
‘The district captain doesn’t like it, but she’s so uptight you couldn’t floss her bum.’
‘Maybe Peiperová will turn out like that.’
‘Nah, she’s a good girl. Knocks spots off anyone else I’ve had here. Doing well, is she?’
‘Very well. Don’t tell her I said so, though. She and Navrátil have hit it off.’
‘Hit it off or had it off?’
‘I doubt the latter. Navrátil doesn’t hold with sex before marriage. I’m not too sure he’s in favour of it after marriage, for that matter. Very straight-laced is young Navrátil. Another good cop, though. I’m bringing them on nicely. One day they’ll be running the Czech police, you mark my words. And they’ll do a damn sight better job than our generation did.’
They drank some more, then Slonský had a random thought. ‘Didn’t you ever want to go higher?’
‘I did.’
‘Why didn’t you, then?’