The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  “Is he dead?” she said.

  “I don’t know. No one knows.”

  Her sob surprised her.

  She put down the glass and got up. She sobbed again, deep inside her chest, and groaned. He got up as well, put out his hand.

  She went past him into the kitchen and opened the small refrigerator. He kept a bottle of Finlandia in the freezer: He did this, he did that, he had his secret ways, and in their lives together she had gradually discovered each way and treasured it as a souvenir of the times when he was not there.

  “If he’s not dead, he’s alive someplace. Is he hurt?”

  “No one knows anything. It happened less than forty-eight hours ago.”

  She poured the thickened chilled vodka into a glass and took the draught like medicine. And then she began to cry, holding the glass in her hand.

  David Mason stepped into the kitchen and took the glass out of her hand.

  She let herself cry in his arms. She cried because he was from Section and Section would always send around a man and would try to tell the woman or the child or the aged father that, well, something had happened. No, we couldn’t go into it exactly, but it was a mission on behalf of the country and your son, your husband, your father showed the highest degree of duty and honor.…

  “Is that why they sent you, to tell me that something happened but you don’t know what happened?” She pushed herself away from him and tightened the belt on her robe. “That’s stupid. That’s really stupid.” She bit her lip. “Show me something, show me who you are.”

  He took out his card and showed it to her. She turned it over in her hand. It was a hard piece of plastic with a color photograph of David Mason, estimator of the Field Investigation division of the Department of Agriculture of the United States of America.

  “Nobody admits anything, even at the end,” she said. “He said there was no Section, no Hanley, no operations division, no company… none of it existed if you pressed anyone on the matter. But he told me,” she said. She said the last words with defiance.

  “I knew him,” he said, regretting the tense. “He recruited me.”

  “He didn’t mention you. Not ever.”

  Perhaps the disappointment in his face pleased her. She wanted to hurt someone who could be hurt. She felt very bad.

  “I’m not really supposed to tell you anything,” he began.

  “Then don’t tell me. He never told me. Sometimes he told me after it was over, sometimes when it couldn’t be avoided—”

  “—He had a train. He was taking someone across—”

  “—never say anything directly. The place might be wired. Talk in washrooms with the water running—”

  “It was the night before last. In Zeebrugge—”

  She wasn’t looking at him. “He got the call in the middle of the night. He got dressed in the dark. I didn’t ask him where he was going because he would never say. He said he didn’t know what it was until they told him. He took his passport and the pistol, he took some money—”

  “He was set up,” David Mason said.

  For the first time, she noticed everything about him. His voice was soft, drawling, but she couldn’t catch the accent. His eyes were lazy and watching and everything about him was uncoiled, restful. His hands were very large.

  “He took the passenger to Zeebrugge and that’s where they disappeared. I went down there. There were machine-gun casings in the gutter and shattered glass, the kind they use in auto windows. I sent that to the desk in Brussels, they’ll ship it to D.C., get a make on the car if they can.”

  “So he might be dead but you don’t have the body.”

  He waited a moment but she didn’t want to speak again.

  “Well, he might be dead,” Mason said.

  “Fuck all you spooks to hell,” she said.

  “Two years ago, I was coming out of a liquor store over the Line and he was in the parking lot with a lady and an old guy, all bent up, and he was stealing my car. A ’seventy-three Rambler. It was comical. Can you imagine stealing a Rambler? I just stood there and asked him what he was doing and he said, very cool, ‘Stealing your car.’ Then he said he’d return it. I got it back a couple of weeks later and this guy was sent and he said he was told to offer me a job. I didn’t even know what it was all about, I didn’t even know what Devereaux was. And the old man, I didn’t know who he was. That’s the way it works, they never tell you anything. They say it’s about security but I figure that’s just bullshit. But it’s a job and that’s something I haven’t had much luck in getting.”

  “He never mentioned you,” she said again but now she was sorry she’d said it. His voice was easy. She felt hurt inside but his voice was easy on her. There wasn’t any pressure at all.

  “See, they figure he’s hit and that’s why they sent me. To tell you. I never did one of these things before, I didn’t know what it would be like. I took the train from Brussels, changed at Geneva. I thought about what you would look like. I was trying to see what you would look like because I knew him. Actually, I just saw him that one time, stealing the Rambler. Damn. I liked him. He was about the first sonofabitch I ever met since my old man died that I figured knew what the hell he was doing. Everybody else is just faking it, but he knew what the hell he was doing.”

  She felt tears again and she saw the man was not as easy as he looked, that there was something coiled inside that loose exterior after all.

  “I don’t figure he’s hit,” David said, veering the words easily the way a sailboat tacks against a light wind on Lac Léman below the town. She felt the words rushing past her and she and Devereaux were in a boat on the lake, pulling for the French side, talking about nothing except the wine and the fried perch for lunch.…

  “If he’s hit, there’s no reason to remove the body. The Belgian police don’t care that much and Section isn’t ever going to explain what this was about. Hanley said they might have thrown him in the sea but he’s never seen Zeebrugge. The sea builds in, the sea is always pounding in, you have to get out a ways to get the tow. I talked to a couple of seamen from the ferries… I don’t think he was hit.”

  Where is he? she said but there was no voice.

  “They’ll look into it the way they look into it. A lot of running around and then they figure they’ve looked enough. I’m supposed to tell you what I told you and a lot less than I told you. I’m going back to Brussels. It all started in Brussels.”

  “Who was he taking across?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or you won’t tell me.”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. But I don’t know. Everything is in a compartment, you know the way it works.”

  “Spies. Games. The old booga-booga. He called it the old booga-booga, a couple of kids trying to scare the hell out of each other.”

  He smiled. When he smiled, he didn’t look as young because the smile had sad edges. “There’s someone in Brussels now, taking a look, but he was sent over from Eurodesk and they don’t have their hearts in it and—”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Devereaux,” he said, surprised. “The matter was too simple for Section to call in someone like Devereaux. So it must have been out of channels and now Section has to depend on channels to find their missing agent. No one is going to look very hard.”

  “God damn them,” she said. “I’ll find him. To hell with Section, I’ll find him.”

  “I want to find him, too,” he said.

  She stared at him. Her eyes were fierce, and in the morning light she took on the look of some predator.

  Mason thought she must be tough because she had to be a woman who could stand up to someone like Devereaux, a man who knew what he was doing. Mason saw that in her as well.

  “I’m supposed to do what I can for you,” he said in a flat tone. “That’s always part of the instruction, I understand. Do what you can. Maybe I can do something for you.”

  She stared at him.

 
“Maybe the best thing is to take you to Brussels because you want to go there. You want to do some things in Brussels and I am going along because that’s part of the instructions,” he said. His voice was so laconic she almost didn’t catch the implication.

  She said, “Yes. Maybe that would be the best thing to do.”

  8

  WAYS OF PERSUASION

  Stephanie Fields instructed Anna.

  They sat at a bare wooden table in one of the windowless interview rooms off the main courtroom. Her hands rested on the table and Anna imitated her posture. They sat very straight and stared into each other’s eyes.

  “Your mother arrived from Prague a little while ago,” Stephanie told her.

  “She can’t be my mother,” Anna said.

  “She has papers and documentation, but we’ll have to wait and see it. The lawyers from the other side are going to arrange a stay and have a hearing next week.”

  “I can stay with you another week?”

  “Yes,” Stephanie said. She saw the leap in the large black eyes. Anna was slow to smile but there was a smile at the edge of her mouth now.

  “Is she your mother?”

  “No,” Anna said. “I was an orphan. I can remember my mother, my real mother, a little, I think. I can remember the way she smelled. It’s funny, but I can wake up sometimes and remember the way she smelled. But this woman I had to stay with, she smells different. And she drinks all the time.”

  “She drinks?”

  “She drinks brandy and vodka even if we have little money.” Anna frowned. No, that was not quite right. The role had to be more sophisticated. “But she drinks. She is drunk in the afternoon all the time. And a man comes to the apartment, but I don’t know who he is. He sits with her.”

  “Does she have a lot of men who come to see her?”

  “Sometimes,” Anna said.

  Stephanie stared straight at her. Anna made her bed in the spare room every morning. She brushed her teeth and combed her hair as though she did the acts consciously and took pleasure in them as individual assertions rather than as part of a routine. She seemed to want to please Stephanie. Stephanie thought she saw the little touch of strain in the child sometimes, a shadow of fear. She had seen the same look in other children, the children who were sometimes broken or beaten or abandoned or unloved, untouched, unwanted. “The abuse of neglect,” someone had called it.

  “Poor Anna,” she said. She touched Anna’s hands folded on the table.

  She had taken the child into her apartment with the permission of the court. It was a bare, modern flat in a rehabilitated three-story building on the near North Side. Stephanie bought clothes for Anna, especially jeans. Anna loved jeans. Stephanie told her one night she would be a beautiful woman, and did she want to be anything besides a movie star? Anna said she wanted to be a mother someday and have children, perhaps three children. She would stop working then, she said. Stephanie had been touched by that sentiment as she was by many things about Anna; she had shared her life with Anna in the last few days like a sister. Stephanie always knew the right thing to do for Anna for the simple, uncommon reason that she was good.

  The quality of goodness in Stephanie had even affected Father Frank Hogan when she had come to interview him for a deposition. Father Hogan had pried a fresh pot of coffee out of the housekeeper in the rectory and they had shared it in one of the plush, “male-club” interview rooms of the house. Father Hogan had felt warmed by Stephanie’s presence that afternoon and had been unusually garrulous for someone under scrutiny by the chancery office.

  Stephanie had asked about the “miracle” and Father Hogan had permitted himself a moment of silence before framing an answer. “Miracles, you might say, are in the eye of the beholder,” he told her. It was a way of showing he was a man of the world. A man of faith, certainly; there was no doubt about that. But a man of the world as well. And she was a woman of the world, was she not? He noticed her legs crept right out from the lap of her blue skirt and they were long and nicely formed. That was the thing about legs, Father Hogan had once thought: Most women have pretty nice legs, all in all.

  “You don’t believe in this miracle?” she had asked.

  “I believe in believers,” he had said. He might have been making a neat point in an argument in theology class at the seminary. “I believe God moves the heart.”

  “Anna said that,” Stephanie said. “She said ‘God moved me.’ It’s an extraordinary thing, don’t you think, for a child to say?”

  “Extraordinary, and her not even all that used to speaking English,” he said.

  “No. She said it in Bohemian but she said it—”

  “Let me put it this way, Miss Fields. Do you believe in weeping statues? I took you over to the church and what did you see?”

  “ ‘What did you go into the desert to see? A man clothed in soft raiments?’ ”

  “You know your Bible. Answer a question with a question.”

  “I saw a statue called the Infant of Prague with stains on the plaster face and a dampness on the lace collar,” she said. “I saw what I saw and I can’t explain it.”

  “So there you are,” Hogan said.

  “I believe in intentions,” Stephanie said. “Anna is a good child and she has a good heart, but I don’t think anyone has ever asked to see it. She’s not so tough and she’s been used by a lot of people, I think, and I don’t want to be someone to use her to get a headline or be on the evening news. That isn’t what this is about. If Anna had been twenty-one years old, she wouldn’t have been questioned about her defection. She would have been accepted just like that. But she’s fourteen and that makes everything about her suspect because children don’t have rights. So she says she is an orphan and some woman is coming from Prague with a lot of papers that say she’s the mother of Anna. Why do I believe those papers and not believe Anna? And if Anna sees a miracle and God moves her heart, why don’t I believe it? And if Anna says she is unloved and unwanted except she was loved by her little Infant of Prague that she had in her home, why don’t I believe her? Or you? Or the courts?”

  “It’s not really up to me—”

  “She saw that statue and something in herself at that moment and it broke her heart,” Stephanie said.

  “We don’t want the church to be used.”

  “You mean the Big C Church or this particular one?”

  “Both,” he snapped.

  Her voice went soft. “I don’t intend to use anyone.” She hesitated. “But I intend to help Anna and this is part of it. The government is no help, they wish Anna would go home, go away. Two men came to see me yesterday, they gave me those phony ID cards. I think they were agents. I mean, spies. The government gets so weird sometimes, you actually start believing in false beards and invisible ink and all that. I’m convinced they were CIA, and they wanted to talk to Anna.”

  Father Hogan started. She saw it.

  “Someone came here.”

  “No, not at all,” he lied.

  “They said they were State Department.”

  “No, not at all,” he lied.

  “I don’t like this,” she said.

  “It doesn’t concern me—”

  “Your church, your miracle—”

  Hogan said, “My connection with Anna Jelinak, whom I have not even met, does not even exist except by the coincidence of videotape. She didn’t even see the statue, Miss. She saw a videotape of a statue. I can’t see what I can do for you any further. Or for Anna.”

  And Stephanie smiled then. The smile dazzled him. He felt like he was ten years old and Sister Mary Theresa was awarding him a gold star in front of the whole class for spelling “thoroughly.” He even blushed in that moment and he never blushed anymore.

  “Pray,” Stephanie said. “You could pray for Anna.”

  All that had taken place the previous afternoon and now she was sitting with her hands folded, as though in prayer, staring at Anna and preparing to toughen her up for all that wo
uld come. It would get down to putting her on the stand at last, and a posturing lawyer from Washington, D.C., acting on behalf of Czechoslovakia and the “rights” of Anna’s mother, would push words at her like weapons and it would be terrible.

  Anna saw the stern, troubled look.

  She smiled. “It will be good when it is over, Stephanie. Do not worry too much.”

  “You break my heart,” Stephanie said then. She smiled and it was the same dazzling smile that had made a priest blush.

  “Anna, you’re going to have to meet this woman. In a room. Alone. I promise you the woman cannot take you back to Prague, but you are going to have to talk to her and I don’t want you to break down or be a baby because you’re not a baby. You’re a woman. You listen to her and you don’t have to say anything. Remember that.”

  “The woman was drunk all the time but she never hit me. It was just like I wasn’t there sometimes,” Anna said.

  “If she didn’t hit you, did she love you?”

  Anna blinked.

  “Stephanie. I don’t know. Can you tell this?”

  “Can’t you tell when you are loved?” Stephanie asked.

  Anna blinked her black liquid eyes. “The woman said I was a mistake.”

  “No,” Stephanie said. “That’s a terrible thing and it isn’t true. You are intended. Everything in the world is intended. Every life. There are no mistakes. God doesn’t make mistakes ever.” And Stephanie touched Anna’s trembling hands.

  So soft, Anna thought.

  Stephanie smiled.

  So warm, Anna thought. Her face was flushed. So warm and there is golden all about. She realized it then, what she felt. She tried the smile on her reluctant features and it broke through. She felt covered by Stephanie’s hands. Stephanie, she thought. Stephanie loves me.

  “Thank you for using AT&T.”

  Ben Herguth jiggled his bulk in the aluminum-sided telephone booth. The phone rang three times and Julie picked it up.

  “Two Langley guys been around a couple of days, they look like they don’t figure what’s going on either. But that doesn’t explain where the fuck Miki is. Nothing from Prague except our man seems on edge, like he knows less than we know.”