The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

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  This is for Andrew MacElhone of Paris and John Lynch of Doonaha, Clare, Republic of Eire.

  On fire that glows

  With heat intense

  I turn the hose

  Of common sense,

  And out it goes

  At small expense!

  —W. S. GILBERT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Cathedral of Our Lady in the town of Chartres possesses a statue of the Virgin which is more than 500 years old and some believe it is a miraculous icon. In the course of Christianity, various icons, places, or particular natural resources (springs, wells, even certain rocks) have been deemed by some to have miraculous properties.

  In 1987, a Greek Christian church in Chicago claimed to possess a wood painting of the Virgin which wept.

  Czechoslovakia is considered among the most skilled weapons producers in the Eastern Bloc and has routinely supplied weapons to revolutionary groups in the West—notably, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Irish Republican Army.

  Prague has gained favor in the West as a film production site because of the city’s beauty and the favorable exchange rate.

  1

  THE AGE OF FAITH

  Everyone in Chartres knows the story of the eccentric Englishman.

  Thirty years ago, he came to the village southwest of Paris to see the wonderful cathedral. All the tourists came in their season. The giant continental tour buses pulled through the narrow market streets and clogged the curbing near the cathedral, and all the tourists went to the great church with their cameras and green and red Guides Michelin. All summer, the tourists mingled with the students and the pilgrims and took photographs of the cathedral and dropped coins in the box for the restoration of the cathedral. They could buy postcards depicting the church and little stickers for their car windows that showed they had come to Chartres.

  The Englishman did none of these things. All that summer he would go quietly alone to the cathedral with a notebook and pencil. He made sketches and paced off distances in the church and wrote long passages about all he saw and felt and thought.

  He studied the cathedral because it was a beautiful thing.

  When it was autumn, the mistral began to blow down through France and touched the Côte d’Azur and colored the leaves on trees along the Seine and Loire and sent the tourists fleeing to their warm homes. Autumn cut down the farm fields around Chartres and autumn rain turned the bare earth black. And the Englishman stayed on past the season for visiting Englishmen.

  Each afternoon, during the quiet time, he sat beneath the great rose windows of the cathedral entrance and contemplated the arching lines of the buttresses and the narrow, vaulted ceiling that soared so far above his head. Some said he studied the church so hard that he began to see the act of faith actually frozen in stone raised eight hundred years before, in an age when the earth was low and naked and even kings were often cold and hungry in their castles.

  The Englishman knew the naked history of the place. How the old church in Chartres burned for a fourth time eight centuries ago, and how the people of the village found a blessed relic of the mother of God in the ashes and saw this as a sign to build the new, great church on the same holy ground. The bishop and the abbot approved this interpretation of the sign and the workers of Chartres began the work of a century, to lift a cathedral by cunning labor over the low, flat fields.

  In time, the people of Chartres realized the Englishman would not leave the cathedral and they accepted him as part of it.

  He stayed in the season and beyond it. Autumn gave way to the holy days of November, when death and the triumph of souls are honored in masses and benedictions. The light shifted in the coming winter sky and the days were gray and brief. The light that came through the immense windows of the cathedral changed every day and made the shadows in the church reveal more of itself. The Englishman would sit and stare at the altars and the statues of the saints and the great nave and the chancel and the red lamp in the sanctuary and see everything past that had come to this moment of beauty.

  After a time of silence and study, the Englishman began to speak of the cathedral. He would gather a few students or pilgrims or even tourists around him and he would let his hands soar to point out the glory of the flying buttresses that lifted the walls to the sky. It was wonderful to hear him speak of the cathedral and how it was made.

  He is still there. In the afternoons, he speaks in the church with his light, English voice filled with affection and humor. He describes the past as if it were an old friend, and he reveals the secrets of the cathedral with his lifted hand. The listeners are always different and what they hear they hear for the first time. The Englishman has written several little books about the cathedral and they are sold in all the shops; he spends his days as a student and pilgrim and an explainer of beauty. It is a simple life, everyone agrees. When he speaks of the church, it is as though he describes his beloved.

  The Englishman lifted his hand.

  He pointed to the rose windows in the great stone wall above the entrance of the church. The gesture carried dignity, like the finger of Adam reaching toward the finger of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The day was full of autumn clouds and sudden rains. The light fell delicately through the stained glass.

  Hanley stared at the Englishman and held his green guidebook in his left hand. He had been waiting for twenty minutes and he had attached himself to the small group of travelers gathered around the Englishman. He felt annoyed because his overcoat was heavy and wet and because someone had kept him waiting.

  Then he saw him at the side door.

  The second man moved from the brief opening of daylight to the shadows to the half-light of the candles on the side altar. The candles were lit as prayers. They illuminated the ashen face of the second man, and Hanley turned away from the group and crossed the center aisle of the church.

  The second man stared at him. Hanley gestured back toward the group on the other side of the church. “He’s been here thirty years,” he said. “Studying the church, talking about it. Thirty years. It’s hard to believe a man would give up thirty years for this.”

  “Did you learn anything?” Devereaux said. There was an edge of sarcasm that made Hanley frown.

  “Nothing that I couldn’t have read about in a book,” Hanley said. “The English are strange. They’re always producing someone like him.”

  “Why are we here?” Devereaux said. He and Hanley turned away from the center of the church and stared at the marble of the side altar. The candles made their harsh winter faces seem softer. Hanley put down the green guidebook on the metal poor box. When he spoke again, he scarcely moved his lips at all.

  “I was wrapped in French security in Paris,” Hanley said. “Then I received a signal and there’s a matter, a simple matter really, that we have to act upon right away.”

  “So you dragged the reluctant pilgrim to Chartres,” Devereaux said. His voice was low and flat and bleak as November fields.

  “I gave security the slip, went out the back way of the hotel—”

  “Hidden in a laundry basket?”

  “Sarcasm,” Hanley said. He had been pleased with himself for s
lipping the French security agents assigned to “observe” him while he met in Paris with the other members of the Western Anti-Terror Committee. It had been as enjoyable as a game in childhood and now Devereaux was trying to spoil his satisfaction.

  “Are we here to pray or to merely observe the beauty of the church?”

  “We are here because it is secure,” Hanley said. His face was bland and round, as featureless as his voice. He was director of operations for Section and was no more at home in the field than Devereaux would have been in the bureaucracy in Washington. But the matter had come up suddenly, and even if it was simple, it had to be handled now.

  “This is about a man who has interested us for a little while. He’s a Czech and he wants to change sides. He has some bona fides to carry along with him and we think it’s worth the chance.”

  “Worth the risk,” Devereaux said. “Worth risking the neck of an agent.”

  Hanley frowned again. “There is no risk.”

  “Do I go to Prague?”

  “No. Not at all. I said there is no risk. We’ve set up a simple train and you’re the conductor. Your passenger leaves tomorrow night from Brussels. You conduct the train and the passenger to Zeebrugge. We’ll have a boat waiting.”

  “Who set this up? Stowe?”

  Stowe was the head of Eurodesk operations for the Section located in Brussels. Stowe was the logical connection for the business. Devereaux knew all this and wondered why Hanley insisted it was a simple matter.

  “Stowe is not involved,” Hanley said.

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “I do not have to do better,” Hanley said.

  They waited for a moment. The statue of a saint stared back at Hanley’s glare. Hanley lowered his eyes and his voice. “There is urgency and a need to involve as few people as possible.”

  “Who runs the train?”

  “Perfectly reliable contractors in Brussels. They’ve been used before.”

  “Then why involve me?”

  Hanley looked up. He seemed surprised. “But you’re our man on the scene. That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Who’s the defector?”

  “Miki. Actually, Emil Mikita is the name. He’s called Miki. A show-business sort of a person, they all have those kinds of short names. In Europe, I mean.”

  “Is he going to play you in the movie?” Devereaux asked.

  “Humor,” Hanley said. He felt compelled to identify remarks and moods of others in order to minimalize them. He never realized that Devereaux thought he was merely showing slowness of wit.

  “Miki is the contact man between the State Ministry for Tourism and Films and a wide range of… Western entertainment interests,” Hanley said. “He is the fixer, you might say, the man who gets things done. He’s well known in some circles.”

  “How nice for him,” Devereaux said. He rested his large hands on the communion rail that fenced off the small side altar. The candles reminded him; the lingering damp in the stone walls, the unblinking statues, the scent of burned incense in the church reminded him. The trouble with living into middle age was being reminded by all sorts of things of childhood, the time before you discovered the way things would turn out.

  “He’s in Brussels for an affair, something about the International Society of Filmmakers. He’s supposed to get an award. Apparently, everyone makes movies in Prague now because of the costs and because the city looks… well, European. The way Europe used to look.”

  Devereaux said, “He travels abroad?”

  “All the time. He’s very connected. Sort of an impresario.”

  “Who works for the government.”

  “That’s the way they do things over there.”

  “He goes to New York,” Devereaux said. “Why doesn’t he defect in Bloomingdale’s?”

  Hanley pursed his lips. “There are complications.”

  “I thought it was a simple matter.”

  “Your name was selected by… by the director.” Hanley referred to Mrs. Neumann, the new Section chief.

  “I’m flattered,” Devereaux said. “How much more complicated does it get?”

  “The complications are all outside, they don’t involve you.”

  Devereaux turned. He stared at Hanley and his gray eyes glittered in the candlelight. There was something dangerous in those eyes and Hanley wanted to turn away but he could not.

  “The complication is outside,” Hanley repeated. “Our competition at Langley. Langley was interested in Miki before we were. Perhaps they tried too hard. Miki has made it clear that he doesn’t trust Langley in this.”

  “But he trusts Section.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Is any of this certain? Or is Section depending on astrology again?”

  Hanley winced. It had been an unfortunate matter and no one mentioned it anymore. Somehow, a clerk rose to GS-15 inside Section. He had complete clearance to the level of Q. And he was in charge of processing new code names for the permanent files of senior field officers. Instead of making random selections, however, he studied astrology charts and imprinted all the agents with names that—given their birth dates and other astrological data—“augured well for Section.” So one became Aries and another became Tuesday and another was called Midnight. And the man who spoke to Hanley now was known on the permanent files as “November,” though he used other names as well.

  “There is a certainty that the risk of snatching Miki is small, compared with potential rewards. He’s a top man in the Prague bureaucracy and he knows secrets and we want them. All Miki wants is a snatch—this is not a defection. He wants to be obliterated by us and buried in an empty grave.”

  Devereaux sighed. “A new name and identity. The country is going to become full of people with new names and new fingerprints, and no one will ever know who they really once were.”

  “Miki is afraid of Langley and that makes him all the more important to us,” Hanley went on. “He hints he has a bit on Langley’s dealings with the Czechs as well.”

  “Hints,” Devereaux said. He used the word with contempt. He was tired of Hanley, tired of traveling. They had telephoned the number in Lausanne and the message had been waiting for him in a folded-up copy of the Journal de Genève at the train station. He had traveled all night and all day, doubling back on himself to make certain he was safe. And Hanley had merely slipped out the back door of a Paris hotel to do the same thing.

  “And what if it’s not what it appears to be?” Devereaux asked. The tone of his voice had not changed, but Hanley felt on guard.

  “There is no risk,” Hanley said.

  “Everything is a risk. Did Miki dictate the terms of his escape?”

  “Not the terms. He doesn’t know the train or the route. He only knows the time. Twenty-one hundred tomorrow at the Grand Place in Brussels. You’ll be out of it less than two hours later. And back home to sleep in Lausanne.”

  “You want him for what he might have on Langley,” Devereaux said, falling into the Section slang term for Central Intelligence Agency. “Just another bit of interagency competition.”

  “The pig that doesn’t fight doesn’t get to feed at the trough,” Hanley said. “Everything is competition in the end.”

  “And what if the business fails? And Miki is part of a trap? Who gets the blame?”

  “It can’t fail,” Hanley said. In the silence, they could hear the clear voice of the Englishman behind them. He was describing the work of lifting stones upon wooden scaffolds to the top of the church.

  “Who gets the blame if it fails?”

  “Whoever kidnapped Miki,” Hanley said.

  There it was between them. November was the sleeping agent, stricken from active files, and yet he was useful in a situation like this. Once a spy, always a spy; it was the rule and they both knew it could never be broken or altered in any way.

  “Not Section,” Devereaux said then. He had the truth at least. Stowe and Eurodesk Section were bypassed be
cause what was about to happen in Brussels would never be traced back to Section if things went wrong.

  “No, not Section,” Hanley agreed. “We would never be involved in a business like that.” He opened his Michelin guide and took out the instruction sheet written in clearspeak. He gave the paper to Devereaux. “You can drop this in the water font by the door. It’s dissolvable.”

  That’s holy water, Devereaux thought. The thought was not voluntary and he flinched from it. It was what he would have believed as a child. That was the cruelty of memory, to keep the faith of childhood alive even in the autumn bleakness of middle age.

  Devereaux looked up from the candles and Hanley was gone and the voice of the Englishman echoed in the vast cathedral. He stared at the piece of paper. Then, almost with reluctance, he made his own way toward the side door. He paused at the marble font and stared at the stale water that was blessed by one of the priests. When the faithful came into the church or left it, they dipped fingers in the water and made the sign of the cross.

  Devereaux opened the door to the last light of afternoon. It was raining. He had crumpled the paper up at the last moment and shoved it deep in the pocket of his coat.

  2

  THE AGE OF REASON

  The statue began to weep on Monday.

  Wally, the church custodian, was the first person to notice the tears. Shortly after school opened, he crossed the concrete courtyard from the school to the church to make sure the heat had been turned down after the morning schedule of Masses. Wally was a tall, shambling man who wore flannel shirts in summer and winter and always carried a black-handled screwdriver in the back pocket of his wash pants.

  He was not a Catholic, but he had been attached to St. Margaret of Scotland Church for so long that everyone assumed he was. He had watched the change of rites and rituals over the years with the eye of a connoisseur: The Latin Mass, with its bowing priests and whiffs of incense, had changed into an English-speaking, homey rite that involved much shaking of hands, playing of guitars, and a new, low altar shaped like a dining room table. Wally thought he did not like the new way as much as the old, and this thought was on his mind the morning he checked the thermostat in the church. At least, that is what he said later.