The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  She saw the way it was. She lowered her eyes. “It was a personal experience for me. It was very moving.”

  “Yes,” said Frank Hogan. “I didn’t realize it at the time when I was getting ready to kick out your cameraman.”

  “Father, can I make a confession?”

  “Now?” Hogan said, raising his eyebrows. “It doesn’t seem to be the time or place.”

  “No. I mean, I want to tell you something. I haven’t been the best Catholic these last few years, but something about what happened here—what is happening here—has touched me.”

  “Well, that’s why I wanted to talk to you. If we’re going to have a miracle on our hands, I want it to be done right. I think I can get you your pictures if you can promise me that St. Margaret’s Church comes out in a good light on this. I mean, we don’t want this to be a freak show like that fellow on television who goes around curing people. We don’t need a Lourdes here, is what I’m saying. This is just… well, like you put it, a religious experience. And I wish you would give credit to the Cardinal in this.”

  “Why the Cardinal?” she said.

  Didn’t the woman understand a damned thing? Frank Hogan thought. But he saw she didn’t and tried another tack.

  “What I’m saying here, Miss Davis, is that I can give your photo… opportunity, I guess they call it, if you would be willing to do me the favor of getting to the Cardinal on this and giving credit to the man and kind of… well…”

  “Putting it on him,” she said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Hogan.

  “Then let’s say that’s what we’ll do,” she said.

  “Can you guarantee it?” he said.

  “Absolutely,” she lied. Her eyes were bright and honest. She wore White Shoulders cologne and a Bill Blass silk blouse. She stood very close.

  “Is the statue… is the Child… still weeping?”

  “Yes,” Hogan said in a sad, small voice. “There’s stains on the collar now and the gown itself.”

  “Can you turn up the church lights?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said in the same forlorn voice.

  “Could we get a shot of you kneeling at the altar?”

  Sure, he thought. It was why he wore his cassock today. And the celluloid white collar. He felt absolutely miserable and it wasn’t just last night’s corned beef hash. He had the feeling of something bad about to happen and being unable to do anything about it.

  Her name was Anna Jelinak and she said she loved Chicago.

  Previously, she had said she loved New York and Boston and Cleveland. In a little while, she was scheduled to love Kansas City, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

  When she said she loved Chicago, she was sitting on a stage in a television studio full of large women who clapped at her answer to the generic question: What do you think of America?

  Anna Jelinak was a very beautiful fourteen-year-old from the city of Prague in Czechoslovakia. She was on a three-week publicity tour in the United States stressing the charm of Czech life, the beauty of its old cities, the culture of its museums, and the exciting world of motion pictures scheduled to be filmed in her native country. She, herself, was a motion-picture star in Czechoslovakia. She had appeared in two typical Czech films about small-town life and in one very long and gloomy French film, which no one understood and which had won a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival the previous summer.

  When Anna said, “I love Chicago,” she sounded a little like Greta Garbo and looked very much, as Time magazine had noted, like a “Pragueish Judy Garland.”

  Now in the studio, the black television hostess was dancing about her one moment and darting to the audience the next, establishing the repartee she was noted for. She was a large woman who carried a microphone in one hand and a trailing cord in the other, and she seemed to float when she moved, as though her feet were wheels under her long dress. Her hands fluttered with practiced gestures as she indicated first this and then that person was to speak to Anna Jelinak.

  “What about pornography? What do we know about porn in Prague?” the hostess suddenly demanded and Anna sat very straight in her chair on the stage and stared at her. She had a good command of English and she had understood all the words, but they did not make any sense to her.

  “You’re in movies, what about sex in movies, in books, in magazines? In other words, how open is Prague today to Western values and Western morals?”

  For the second time, Anna Jelinak answered with a blink of her pretty black eyes. What was this woman saying?

  The hostess machine-gunned some more words at her and Anna finally caught a few. She blushed and put her hand to her mouth and a few women in the large audience tittered behind the smiling hostess.

  “If there is such in my country or my city, I do not know of it,” she said. Her voice was deep, and the way she carried the foreign words, they made a nice lilt. “In my country, I think it must be, children are permitted not to see the evil in the world. They are allowed to be children still.”

  Applause burst from the audience and the hostess flashed her famous smile and Anna felt comforted by the applause. She craved applause, which made her a good actress; she was warmed by the sounds of many hands clapping, even the applause of stagehands on a movie set. Most of the time she felt alone and frightened, but there was always the moment of applause when she was secure.

  “Children should be allowed to be children,” the hostess was saying. “What about us, Anna? What you’ve seen of America so far, do you think we exploit our children? Do you think we have become a permissive society?”

  “Well, I think it is a good thing so many children can afford to have blue jeans,” Anna said. Waves of laughter and more warm applause. She had won their hearts and she knew it. The Ministry for Tourism and Films would be pleased; Anton Huss, her temporary guardian in the U.S., would be pleased; even the sour old woman who pretended to be her mother in Prague would be pleased. It was a form of sweet revenge to be loved by these strangers.

  She looked around the studio at the audience, her vision limited by the intensity of the arc lights that brightened the stage. Beyond the lights, behind the phalanx of cameras and booms, Anton Huss stood and watched her. He was a precise man who wore wool blue suits and starched white shirts. His clothes were cut in the European manner and he wore his hair a little longer than Americans did at that time. His sallow skin framed large, green eyes and he had an air of sadness and a little mystery about him. He listened carefully to all that Anna Jelinak said because there would be reports filed and evaluations made and questions asked, all the way up to the office of the Minister. He did not want this assignment any more than Anna wanted him as a guardian.

  He was liaison at the embassy in Washington between the Secret Service and the other branches of the diplomatic mission. Essentially, the Czech mission was concerned with tourism, trade, and espionage, but since everything is the province of espionage, Anton Huss made certain that his specialty was not overlooked by the other branches as they went about more mundane matters.

  There are no mundane matters, the Deputy Secretary of the embassy had once told him: All espionage is the light of intelligence brought to examine what appears to be ordinary. In that special light, said the pompous Deputy Secretary, all that is ordinary is revealed to be something more than it seems to be.

  Anton Huss shook his head at the memory of the aphorisms of the Deputy Secretary. He endured them just as he endured this foolish assignment, to guard Anna Jelinak as she toured the United States on behalf of promoting tourism and the Czech film industry. Guard her from what? She was a good enough actress to get her way around any difficult situation.

  At first, in New York, where they stayed in separate rooms at the Plaza Hotel, Anton Huss was afraid Anna was practicing feminine wiles on him. She flirted her way through a long lunch and Anton’s spirits had sunk. Was it going to be this bad through the whole tour? But no: Anna was just practicing, he decided afte
r a while. She had no interest in Anton. She was merely a professional actress and she wanted Anton to love her because he was there. He decided to feign affection in a friendly avuncular way, and an amazing thing happened: Anna froze suddenly, her black eyes went cold. She said in her clear, precise Prague accent, “You do not like me. Very well, then. We can proceed on that basis and have as little to do with one another as is possible.”

  What did that mean? Anton Huss had thought. What complicated thought lay behind her sudden shifts in mood? The Deputy Secretary would tell him to bring the light of intelligence to the subject to see it better. But then, the Deputy Secretary was an idiot.

  Before Anton left Washington and the lovely, lingering autumn full of pretty leaves and pretty girls, he was given one final charge by the Deputy Secretary: “Remember, security is to be provided both ways. Anna Jelinak is a very important person to us, to the country, and it would not be the first time the CIA would attempt to subvert some… honest opening between our country and the United States… to purposes that were… well…”

  Anton Huss understood the old man even before he finished. Defections. The Czechs had a sorry record in the department of defections. Sometimes it seemed Prague had a mission to train tennis stars who would mature into American refugees. No mistakes, Anton Huss: Make certain Anna does not let the light of apparent freedom blind Anna to her duties to the fatherland.

  More applause, and it pushed his gloomy thoughts out of mind. Anton took a step forward and was boxed between two cameras. Anna was smiling and the black woman was smiling and he guessed this program was over. It was hard to be certain because this television business seemed a matter of stops and starts. There were so many times when the people onstage would not be on camera and the men in shirt sleeves would run around and tear pieces of paper from their pads or talk and joke with each other or just stand transfixed, listening to voices through earphones. It was maddening, he said to Anna. She had laughed at him and said, “You should see the way it is making films.”

  Yes, it was truly over. As always, Anton Huss stepped forward and put his hand in Anna’s hand as though by renewing the physical contact he reminded her of who she was and what reality was. Reality was Prague, control, orders; it was difficult in the chaos of this vast, sprawling country to assert reality.

  The cameramen stepped from behind the cameras and one of them smiled at Anna and said something in colloquial Bohemian that brightened her face. Anton looked suspiciously at him. It would be like the CIA to plant an agent provocateur as a cameraman. They had to hurry along in any case. He tugged her hand. She glanced up at him. “One more program, Anna,” he said. “We have to hurry.”

  “I’m so tired,” she said.

  “One more and then we catch the airplane—”

  “I’m so tired,” she said again. They were treading their way through snakes of cables and the apparatus of backstage. “Can’t we cancel this?”

  But Anton Huss was a man of duty. The schedule must be obeyed. Even Anna knew that.

  Hal Newt said, “This is fine, this is fine, Kay. Look at the light level. Dick does good picture. And this is ours? I mean, this is all ours exclusively?”

  “Ours and that includes the newspapers, at least until tomorrow morning. The priest is in a bind, the way I told you.” Her face was flushed. At the last minute, she had thought she wouldn’t get the Cardinal at all, but he had done a nice little sit-down about faith moving mountains and some other blah-blah-blah. Kay Davis had worked her ass off on this and it showed. And she noticed Hal Newt wasn’t talking about “book” and “public perception” and “grooming” and all the other bullshit he threw at her at Arnie’s last Friday.

  “Fine, fine,” Hal Newt said, watching the monitor unroll the tape. They were sitting side by side in the control booth. Below, on the set of News at Five—the same as News at Ten except the cardboard skyline of the city was moonlit on News at Ten—Dr. Winkle the weatherman was sticking rainclouds over Minnesota and northern Wisconsin and otherwise preparing his map.

  They had gone over the tape twice and Hal Newt had asked the serious questions that Kay knew the answers to. And they kept going back to the big scene, the one that made it all worthwhile. The whole town was talking about a statue that wept in a Catholic church on the northwest side—but no one except for a few who had gone to mass in the morning had actually seen the miracle.

  “There,” Kay Davis said.

  They froze the tape.

  “There and there,” she said, tapping the monitor.

  “It’s clear, but you have to say what it is,” Hal Newt said.

  “Tears,” she said. “Tears on the face of the Christ Child.”

  “I just wish it stood out more. Had more… you know… drama.”

  Kay Davis sighed. It was always like this. The inside people never understood a fucking thing. Stand on your head, balance thirty-two bottles of champagne, interview the President in his underwear, and you bring it back and shrink it down to twenty-one diagonal inches on videotape and someone says he wished it was more dramatic. Fuck them.

  “You expected blood, Hal? I told you it was a crying statue, not a bleeding one.”

  “Well, just so we make it clear what we’re seeing. Tell them what it is.”

  “Do a freeze-frame,” she said. “Freeze it and blow it up so they understand what they’re seeing.”

  “We want dignity though,” Hal was saying. “No Geraldo Rivera on this, we got to keep it from turning into a circus.”

  Kay Davis didn’t say a thing. She was riding a good high and Hal couldn’t bring her down from it. It’s the high from being inside on a story, making the news instead of running after it. He couldn’t bring her down from that.

  “Other problem is time. We got eighty-seven seconds here and I can’t figure where to cut. Let’s lose the Cardinal,” Hal said.

  “I promised—”

  “What?”

  “The priest. Hogan. He’s in a box on this. I think he thinks the church might think he was hotdogging on this miracle thing and I promised him I would slice in the Cardinal so that it looks more… well, like you said, dignified.”

  “We’ve got to get this down to fifty-five moving and five seconds on the freeze frame.”

  “It’s News at Five, Hal, not World News Tonight. It’s worth it, Hal.”

  “Honey, the end of World War Two isn’t worth eighty-seven seconds. People lose their concentration. You can’t beat them over the head with this.”

  “Hal, this is Chicago, a very big Catholic city, very religious.”

  “Gimme a break, Kay,” Hal said. “But maybe I’ll talk downstairs with Big Tuna, see what we can work out.”

  Kay felt chilled. Big Tuna was the Man, the Voice, the Presence, the $900,000 salary. He was Tom Day, smoked a pipe and boomed the news. No event happened until Tom Day said it had. Tom Day might just be able to give eighty-seven seconds—if he could worm his way into the story.

  Kay got up then and walked up the stairs out the back of the control booth into the concrete-block hallway that led to the dressing rooms and Studio B. Here they taped all the public-service programs like the Sunday-morning winner Leap of Faith, which involved religious discussions with aerobic exercises. Dick Lester was coming out of the tape room. He smiled at Kay. “What do they think?”

  “Hal said you do good picture.”

  “I’m thrilled,” Dick Lester said. “Are they going to freeze-frame the tears?”

  “Yes. I think so.” She felt distracted. It was a good story but now Big Tuna was going to worm his way into it.

  “What did you think? I never asked you,” Dick said.

  “About what?”

  “The statue,” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “What about the tears? I mean, I’ve been thinking about it. You get these weird things sometimes, like that barn in Ohio where someone said he saw Christ on it. I mean, I was there and that statue was crying.”


  “Oh, come on, Dick.”

  “I looked all around—”

  “Look, Dick. The roof leaks or something or there’s undried wood under the plaster or something. Statues don’t cry.”

  Dick flushed. “I know that. But I know what I saw. So what did I see?”

  Kay Davis tried a bright, smart smile, the one that made men think she was just a bit too cool and too damned competent and was the reason she was not on her way to New York and might very well be going back to Iowa.

  “You saw sixty seconds on News at Five and, if we get lucky, a slot on the national news tomorrow night. That’s what you saw, Dick.”

  Tom Day boomed: “Prague is in the news tonight.”

  Kay Davis, sitting to his right, nearly groaned. Only Big Tuna would make a connection like that.

  The child sat between them in the guest chair on the set. The set was called The Bridge by nearly everyone because it was designed to look like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. In the middle of the bridge was Anna Jelinak, a child star from Czechoslovakia. Tom Day, in his typically idiotic way, was connecting the girl from Prague with Kay’s story of a weeping statue.

  Tom Day was doing more than that and it made Kay furious beneath her Number 2 coat of pancake makeup. It broke all the rules: Tom was leading into her story and giving it away.

  “And just how did you manage to get this remarkable film, Kay?”

  He still said “film” instead of “tape.” He even believed in the coaxial cable and thought instant replay was magic.

  Kay was not prepared for the question and pushed it aside. “Tom,” she ad-libbed, “this is an extraordinary story of a statue that apparently weeps, the statue of the Christ Child called the Infant of Prague. As you know, I’ve been the first person to see the statue and now I have tape tonight so that you can see what I’ve seen and judge for yourself.”

  Take that, asshole, she thought. Hal Newt was slicing his hand across his throat in the control booth and squeaking into Tom Day’s earpiece, “Cut it, cut it, cut it, she’s running over.”