The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  “But you didn’t pay for me.”

  “No.”

  “Then you should arrange to sell me.”

  “Who should I sell you to?”

  “Whomever you think will want to pay.”

  Cernan almost smiled behind the ferocious mask. “Is that Central Press Association?”

  “Yes. I have a number for them in Brussels. They will pay.”

  “I believe you,” Cernan said. “Not that I do not know you are a spy. But perhaps you are very important to me. Perhaps I should make an inquiry about you.”

  “Why are you waiting here?”

  Cernan’s face was without expression and Devereaux probed a second time with the same question.

  “You paid X to a man for the return of Emil Mikita. You were not instructed about me and you want to know if you have to bring me back. That would complicate matters. On the one hand, perhaps you would be rewarded, given little brownie points by the Ministry; on the other hand, no one knows about me. So what am I worth? If you paid X, perhaps someone will pay Y to you for me and you make money on the deal.”

  Cernan waited, lighting another cigarette.

  “Opportunities to make money in the field are not unheard of. Who would know if I am gently returned to my… former calling… and you take your money to a Swiss bank and take Miki back to Prague? A neat arrangement. The problem for you is time, isn’t it? How much time do you have to arrange the deal before your masters become suspicious?”

  “What if it was not about money at all? What would you say then, Mr. Devereaux?”

  Devereaux hesitated.

  There was a fierce certainty about Cernan in that moment.

  “Not everything can be explained in terms of money,” he said. “What if I use you to pry… someone else… to return to Prague?”

  “Who?” Devereaux said.

  Cernan did let the smile fall now. “You see, an American sees everything in terms of what it will cost and what he is willing to pay. But there are matters beyond money, do you know that? But you know that, do you not? Do you know a beautiful woman—I have not seen her, but she is described to me—a beautiful woman right this moment in Brussels? A woman with red hair and green eyes and a very dangerous idea in her head? She is looking for someone and she is probably going to get killed for her troubles. Does she do this for profit? What is her motive but money? But no, she is doing this in the name of love. It is touching. Do you know anything about this woman?”

  Devereaux shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You see, I know a lot of things,” Cernan said. “I know about you, about this woman, but I do not know what can be arranged to satisfy myself. Perhaps if I can wait—a day or two days or even, perhaps, three days—I can resolve all of this and that will make me happy.”

  Devereaux said nothing. He stared at Cernan and the wide, flat face and flat brown eyes and then he spoke again: “Will they let you wait?”

  Cernan blinked. He hardly moved at all.

  “Perhaps we will talk again,” he said at last.

  “Will there be time?”

  The question had no answer because neither man knew.

  17

  THE AMERICAN PRISONERS

  Henkin glared at Gorkeho. It was a look to make underlings tremble. Unfortunately, Gorkeho was a soldier and was only frightened by truly frightening things. He stood at something like attention and waited for Henkin to continue.

  “You have lost contact? That is an incredible admission, Gorkeho. I make the arrangement, I give you instructions that when Miki is picked up that I am to be informed and that I will take over the disposition of the matter—these are orders from the highest level—and you tell me with great casualness that you have lost contact with Cernan.”

  “Unfortunately, it is true. These things happen. Whatever his reasons, I am sure that Cernan is in a delicate situation, calling for absolute silence—”

  “He is on a simple matter of picking up one of our strays and returning him. I am to be informed at all times,” Henkin raged. “And now you admit to me that even you are not informed because Cernan chooses to not report to you.”

  “If you understood our business,” Gorkeho began, letting in his small dig without any preliminaries, “you would understand that the agent in the field has wide discretion to meet any situation that may arise—”

  Henkin said, “There is nothing that ‘may arise’ in any of this. This is a simple matter of transmitting one person from one place in Europe to another. A simple matter.”

  “Ah, but you are wiser than I, pan Henkin. Perhaps you understood that it needed a very experienced man like Cernan when I, too, thought it such a simple matter.” Cernan would have understood Gorkeho’s little smile. “Perhaps it is not so simple after all, but you have done well to assign such a veteran as Cernan to it.”

  Damn him, Henkin though.

  But what could he say to the grinning little one-legged martinet?

  It was 1600 hours in Prague and it was snowy and already the light was failing at the end of the dreary day and they had not heard from Cernan for thirty-six hours. Was the money passed on? Was Miki in Cernan’s hands? Sixteen hundred hours Prague time would be 0900 in Chicago. It was happening right now but everything that happened was of no use if Henkin could not contact Cernan and make him do what he wanted him to do.

  Gorkeho was still smiling and anger bubbled inside Henkin and he wanted to tell him, he wanted to order him—

  Order him to do what?

  But then, he could not say, could he?

  Where the hell was Cernan anyway?

  Mrs. Neumann put her hands in her lap and waited for Hanley. The blip from Eurodesk had arrived at six in the morning and Hanley had rushed down to Section from his apartment on the hill near the National Cathedral on Wisconsin Avenue. The blip had been “ironed out” and the words rendered into clearspeak.

  “There are only two possibilities,” Hanley said.

  Mrs. Neumann said, “It is true or it is not true.”

  Hanley frowned. “That’s obvious. The motive in either case is not obvious.”

  “Eurodesk has received a message through the Secret section of the Czech trade mission in Brussels. Without going into all of it, there is a trade proposed. The life of an American agent for the return of a Czech citizen.”

  Hanley said, “Anna Jelinak. I still have an incomplete report. It seems she’s the little girl who defected in Chicago more than a week ago. I don’t really see any connection at all.”

  Mrs. Neumann glanced at the clock on her desk, next to the photograph of Leo taken two years ago at Yellowstone Park. Behind Leo was the geyser Old Faithful. The photo had amused both of them and it was her favorite of all the photos she had taken of her beloved over the years.

  “It’s nearly eight A.M.,” she said. “When do they want an answer?”

  “Twelve hours. That makes it five P.M. our time, eleven P.M. Brussels time.”

  “And midnight in Prague. What is behind this, Hanley? This is so bizarre.”

  “Coincidence, except that it is usually never coincidence,” he said. “They describe November, they say he is ‘damaged’ but alive and they propose the trade. They don’t mention Miki but we assume they have Miki as well.”

  “Then the Czechs hit our train, not Colonel Ready.”

  Hanley had been over that ground in his mind waiting for Mrs. Neumann to show up. “Or Colonel Ready works for the Czechs,” he said. “Or Colonel Ready hit the train as we assumed and sold both bodies to the Czechs. The Czechs are interested in Miki and not terribly interested in November. Or, to put it differently, more interested in obtaining Anna Jelinak.”

  “But that’s something we can’t agree to.”

  “Mrs. Neumann, we don’t even know what the aspects of this Jelinak case are. What is the connection between Miki and Anna Jelinak? They are both in the theater world, the films—perhaps Anna is part of the puzzle picture we t
hought we obtained in bringing Miki across. I’ve only had an hour, we are cross-checking the Competition to see if they have an interest in this Anna Jelinak.”

  “Do they?”

  Hanley pulled his lower lip. “There are inconsistencies. There is a Langley man named Willis assigned to the matter but in an observatory way. I don’t know why Langley is impacted when a little girl sees weeping statues in Chicago. And I don’t understand why they pick her out of the blue as the trade for Devereaux. Devereaux for Anna Jelinak, all delivered to Eurodesk by messenger from the Czech trade mission in Brussels at eleven o’clock at night.”

  “Is there any chance of making the trade?”

  Hanley sighed. He was the operations director and Mrs. Neumann was chief of Section. Mrs. Neumann set the “guidelines” for operation but that was not what she was asking now. She was asking for all the possibilities. Did she really want to know about black-bag jobs and how they are done? Hanley frowned again. Perhaps it was time to continue Mrs. Neumann’s education.

  “Of course. We can simply disappear the little girl. It will take two men. The safest way is to use contractors and then flush the contractors. The next safest way is to take someone from the field—say someone like Tuesday in Ethiopia now—and bring him in, set the target, have the job finished in less than three days, and send him back to Ethiopia without really being involved in it. Then you put a negotiator of the highest level on this. I would say someone like me. You make certain the goods are as stated on the bill of lading and you make the trade. Not here, not in Brussels, some third place.”

  “Everything you say breaks the law,” Mrs. Neumann said in her harsh whispery voice.

  “Yes, Mrs. Neumann.” Hanley said it with mild words. “You ask for the possibility and you shrink from the payment. You ask me if a thing can be done and then, when I say it can be done, you don’t want to know it.”

  Mrs. Neumann put her hand on the picture frame. Leo. It is so complicated, Leo, you would be as horrified as I am. Perhaps ignorance was bliss after all and knowledge was not power because it induced a sort of weakness.

  “This all began with Miki,” she said. “He gave us hints and we were intrigued. Gullible. He said he knew about the Central Intelligence Agency and about dealings with arms merchants in the Middle East and how weapons were made and smuggled to the Afghans.… It was so intriguing, all of it. And the business about the films, about how the money was transferred back and forth between countries.… He lured us and suckered us and we fell for it so that we went outside our own channels and set up a senior intelligence officer and it all started collapsing after that.”

  “This is not a morality play,” Hanley said. “This is merely real life. It is a fragmentary existence, and the scenario does not hold together because life is fragmentary and there is no scenario. The ethics are defined by the situation. We wanted Miki bad enough to do something about it and someone else wanted Miki bad enough to do something about it and our wills collided. There has been a certain amount of… breakage… as a result. Now it is at a pass where we are offered a simple trade. I think we would be foolish not to explore it.”

  “How…”

  “It is eight in the morning here, seven in Chicago, and we are trying to find out the status of this matter with the Jelinak girl. I think we should be prepared to give the Czech mission an answer before their deadline. It does not necessarily have to be the final answer or even the truth. But it keeps open the possibility that Devereaux stays alive a few more hours in the event that he is alive at all. That is time that is given to Stowe and his agents to find Devereaux, find his status out.”

  “And Rita Macklin?”

  He snapped his fingers. “An annoyance, nothing more serious. Mason follows her and she goes in circles. I leave Mason to her in the event Colonel Ready reappears. I knew that was your wish. But she’s of no consequence in this, now that we know—”

  “We should tell her. That he is alive.”

  Hanley glared at her and she blushed. Of course it was foolish.

  “All right, Hanley.” She hesitated. She had always been so certain and in the months since she had become chief of Section, she had learned hesitation. “We’ll wait. To see what we can learn in Chicago and what Stowe can learn.”

  “And make them an offer before tonight?”

  She nodded. “And make them an offer.”

  Three men walked into the foyer of the building on Seminary Avenue at three minutes after nine in the morning. It was 1603 in Prague and Henkin had finished yelling at Gorkeho.

  The three men studied the mailboxes for a moment and then one of them nodded. A fourth man sat in a car at the curb. A fifth man waited in a car in the alley behind the three-flat.

  Six minutes earlier, a large tow truck had careened down Seminary and smacked into four parked cars, doing severe damage to them. The policeman in the parked squad car up the block providing security for Anna Jelinak and Stephanie Fields had noticed the incident and started after the tow truck that turned west on Webster at the corner.

  The three men in the foyer had sledgehammers. They walked up the steps past the unoccupied flats on the first two floors. First Floor went to work at the commodities exchange at five-thirty in the morning; Second Floor went to work at IBM at 7:55 A.M.

  Anna was dressed in white and looked like a little girl. They were going to court again. Anna did not have to wear a ribbon in her hair. Stephanie said that it was too much of an effect. In fact, Stephanie knew that Anna did not want to seem to be a little girl.

  Stephanie was finishing her tea in the kitchen. She wore a gray pinstriped suit and silk blouse with a small black tie. Her briefcase was worn: It was brown leather and carried her initials and it had been a gift from her brother in Cleveland when she was graduated from law school six years before.

  They heard the sound at the front door and looked at each other with fear draining all the color from their faces. Anna screamed then, one long piercing yell.

  Stephanie grabbed the wall telephone. It was dead. She hit the receiver and it was still dead. She glanced out the back window and saw the man in the alley. The sledgehammer cracked the oak door at the front of the hall. Two more whacks and the door was open and broken.

  The men crowded into the narrow corridor and one went into the front room and the second man went into the first bedroom. They looked in the bathroom and the first man ran to the kitchen and saw them.

  Stephanie had turned the locks and the back door was nearly open when the first man got into the kitchen.

  She saw the man, saw Anna, saw she could not open the door in time. She grabbed the black sawtooth knife she had just used to cut the bread. She pushed Anna behind her to the place where the kitchen counter met the stove top.

  “Get out of here,” she said in a low, flat voice. She held the knife the right way, close in to her body. The real knife fighter holds it wide, but that is when the other man does not have a sledgehammer. She held it close and watched the room fill up with the others.

  “Don’t hurt her,” Stephanie said. Her voice was calm.

  “Nobody gets hurt,” the first one said. “That’s really up to you, though.”

  The voice didn’t have any threat in it. The speaker had a thin face and flat nickel eyes.

  “Get out right now, there’s a policeman outside, he’s waiting for us. You don’t know who we are.”

  “She’s gonna talk you to death, George,” the second one said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Put the knife down and get out of the way.”

  Stephanie held the knife. The first one whacked her arm with the sledge and her arm broke and the knife fell out of her hand. She blacked out and slipped to the floor, the pain all white in her head.

  “Why’d you call me ‘George’?” the first one said. “Now I gotta whack her.”

  “Don’t whack her. Nobody has to get whacked.”

  George thought about it.

  He looked at the crumpled body.


  “I guess so,” George said. “There’s a lot of Georges.”

  “She saw you though,” said the third one.

  George thought about it.

  “Yeah, you’re right. And she’s a lawyer. She could remember better than a lot of people.”

  “Yeah,” said the third one.

  “Well, let’s get the kid out of here,” said George.

  They grabbed her arm. George stared at her and Anna said, in a sob, “Please do not hurt Stephanie. I love Stephanie.”

  “I won’t hurt her, she’ll be all right,” George said. “You’ve got to go downstairs now.”

  The other two men led Anna through the apartment, past the shattered front door, and down the stairs. George bent down over Stephanie’s crumpled form and shot her then, very clean, once through the base of the skull. The sound was small, even in the quiet apartment, because of the silencer screwed onto the .22 automatic. Anna never heard a thing.

  18

  ONE MORNING IN BRUSSELS

  Philip Petty, the manager, spoke to Jans: “The woman who came in alone tonight?”

  “Who else would I mean?”

  “Well, the problem with what you’re talking about is that she might be connected with some agency we’re not aware of.”

  “I’ve looked into that.”

  “You have pretty good sources,” Philip agreed. They were drinking coffee and brandy in the tavern of the Club Tres. It was a little past dawn and they had not locked the front door although the last customer had left two hours ago. They stood on each side of the wide oak bar with their shirt collars open.

  “She’s a very highly paid freelance journalist. Everyone is a freelance journalist but not a lot of them make any money.”

  “Who pays her?”

  “Legitimate sources. American magazines. She has a contract with one of the weekly magazines.”

  “But this place is not news.”

  “Well, you’re being coy again, Philip. You don’t want me to speak plainly.”

  “I do want you to speak plainly, Jans. I just don’t like to jump into something if there’s some way to avoid it. You know that being cautious is—”