The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  “The same old cold,” she said.

  “The same on the phone. I made the soup. You ever coming home?”

  “Things are… things are confused.”

  “You got people work for you, you can’t do everything yourself.”

  “Leo. I want to come home, with all my heart. I want to put on that nightgown and have you make love to me and be all warm with you in the bed. I want to sleep a week.”

  “You don’t get away with sleeping right off the bat, honey.”

  She tasted the soup and thought of Leo and let the thought warm her. Then the door opened and Leo was gone and the soup lost its taste.

  Hanley sat down. He had not gone home in two days either and he looked it. He had no one waiting for him in the old apartment on Massachusetts Avenue.

  There was unspoken intimacy between them. The matters were grave and they spoke in a kind of shorthand.

  “Mason found a note she left him. She said she had a rendezvous with Colonel Ready and she was going to kill him and he was supposed to follow after her. He found a bicycle she rented on a path outside Bruges.”

  “Belgium police.”

  “Yes. He made the notification. Just a tourist, met this girl, was supposed to meet her for dinner in some suburb and she didn’t show and he found her bicycle. He’s a correspondent for Central News Associates.”

  “They know that cover if they check with their own intelligence people.”

  “It’s the best we can do for now. Besides, it’s mostly true. Straight police case.”

  “Poor girl. She knew he was dead and it wasn’t true at the time at all and now she’s dead. The whole thing is blown.”

  “Our Pennsylvania cousins keep in touch.” Hanley meant the FBI. It was the newest jargon, fitted for the FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue. “They’re absolutely bonkers about the mess in Chicago. I think it’s genuine. No trace of the girl. Not a trace. And Langley?” She had not spoken but Hanley was talking as fast as his thoughts were processed. “Langley is uncomfortable. They make little probes in Brussels, here, Chicago. They made contact with the Czechs a couple of days before Anna disappeared in Chicago. The backgrounder is Langley wants the girl sent back home. Or did. Why is Langley involved at all? Because we had suspicions from the beginning. And Miki gave us a hint. This is bigger than a defection and we knew it all along and we didn’t tell Devereaux.” The last remark was the closest Hanley was willing to come to express regret.

  “Finding the little girl really is up to the cousins. This is their business,” Mrs. Neumann rasped again.

  “But we can’t get back our agent until she is found. And we don’t even know if the Czech contact in Brussels is interested in trading anymore.” The thought crossed both of their minds.

  “Someone walks into a house and snatches a little girl and murders a woman and that is just possible, isn’t it?” Mrs. Neumann was not speaking to Hanley. “Why? Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Why tie Devereaux’s return to getting Anna back to Prague?” Hanley said. “I don’t understand any of it. We messaged back through the couriers to whoever has Devereaux, but there hasn’t been a reply.”

  “Did you try again?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the woman in Chicago? The television person?” Mrs. Neumann asked. She was so tired. Her life had become confined to this room in the corner of this vast, dreadful building. The smell of the bureaucracy filled the corridors. It was musty and mean. She spent her life now asking questions and never getting the full answers.

  “The cousins are on that. Working it to death, but Kay Davis doesn’t know any more than they do. The dead man was someone who apparently knew someone on the janitorial staff, some sort of juice loan or something, and that was how he gained access to her—to Kay Davis’—apartment. That’s all anyone knows.”

  “All anyone knows is nothing. We have lost an agent, we have botched a simple defection, now we’re probably responsible for the death of that woman.”

  “The one in Chicago—”

  “Rita Macklin,” she said. “Is this all some attack on Section? Is this part of—”

  Hanley felt the same shiver of paranoia. The trouble with paranoia in intelligence is that it is often truth disguised lightly by neurotic delusions.

  “Stowe and Eurodesk in Brussels pinpoint the wreck of the train to the driver. His name was Klaus Beng and he was freelance. He was vetted by Club Tres. His body was found washed up in the harbor at Zeebrugge four hours ago. Chaser is pursuing the Ready connection.”

  Mrs. Neumann closed her eyes. She thought of Leo and she thought of sleeping in Leo’s bed. She opened her eyes and there was chicken soup in a thermos. And Hanley across the desk from her.

  “Continue,” Mrs. Neumann said and unscrewed the top of the thermos of soup. Continue questions, continue answers. At least the smell of the chicken soup blotted out the mean, musty smell of the bureaucracy all around her.

  Ben Herguth said, “I don’t understand it.”

  The man called Julie sighed. “It isn’t so complicated. You botched killing Kay Davis.”

  “I admit it. Who would think a guy could fuck up something that simple?”

  “So what can we do? So Al Buck gets her the job back, with a raise, and we go on from there. You got the little girl—”

  “Stashed tight, Julie,” Ben Herguth said.

  “But you killed this lawyer—”

  “Don’t lay that on me, Julie. That was someone else. One of the buttons did it, doesn’t have a brain in his head. You think three guys could handle one broad and one little girl without making a mess.”

  “So the FBI is making it uncomfortable, even the cops are putting heat on this, they look bad.… I don’t know. I’m only doing this for Henkin. Henkin wants the girl. It’s complicated but it has to do with Miki. Henkin says it’s the only way he can push the button on Miki. He doesn’t want Miki back in Prague and we don’t want Miki loose in the States. Miki has to be a dead man.”

  “You told me,” Ben said again. “I still don’t see it. If Henkin is a big shot, hell, he’s in a fucking Communist country, he can whack anyone he wants.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Julie said.

  Ben Herguth listened. He sometimes felt he was spending his life in phone booths. He wanted to be back in L.A., he wanted to be out of this terrible environment. Julie was feeling sorry for himself but at least he was in a big office, sitting in his own environment. Big Ben was getting too old to be on the streets, working out of phone booths. It was cold in Chi.

  “Henkin wants to arrange something for Miki,” Jules said in his vague way. “He doesn’t give me the details, but we have to have the girl for… leverage. All right. We have no choice right now. We’ve got contracts signed, we have to ‘mule’ for Uncle, all this is going down in January, and here it is the middle of November. This whole thing keeps falling apart and we keep propping it up.” Jules, at the other end of the telephone in a warm corner office in New York, felt sorry for himself and it was a luxury.

  He said, “Ben, the more you deal with government people, the more you realize one thing.”

  Ben waited. He had heard this before.

  “You realize the only people on earth who know what they’re doing are people like us.”

  Ben shivered because it was so damned cold in the phone booth.

  22

  BARGAIN

  Devereaux held her. They stood in the kitchen and he held her for a long time and felt her strong body beneath his fingers. He inhaled her scent, he pressed into her curves. She clung to him and she was crying a little, more from a sense of relief than anything else. He was alive! They might have been survivors of some tragedy who suddenly realize they are still alive when all around them are dead.

  The kitchen was growing dark. The light of the brief November day moved from gray to gloaming purple, colored by a distant setting sun that dropped into the clear from the clouds.

  “W
hy?” he said at last.

  “I had to come after you. I thought you were alive. And then I thought Colonel Ready had you and I had to kill him. I had to come after you.”

  She told him about Club Tres on La Grand Place in Brussels and about the man named Reiter who described Colonel Ready to her. She had come after Colonel Ready to kill him. She took out the opened knife in her raincoat and he smiled. He held it a moment.

  “It’s a little knife,” he said. He closed the blade and put it in his pocket like a souvenir.

  It was. She saw it. It was absurd. It was as though she had reasoned everything out but it had only been a dream and when she awoke—now—she realized how absurd the dream had been.

  “My God, where are we? Can we go? Is it over?” she said.

  He held her and looked at her in the fading light. Her eyes were so bright. He touched her lips with his fingers and she opened her mouth. He kissed her. It was a deep kiss and it went on for a long time, with hunger and hurt at both ends of the kiss. She strained against him so that he could feel her breasts and the warmth in her belly.

  Night came heavily around the house and pressed against the windows. The men had gone, Miki had gone, they were alone in the world.

  “Can we leave now?”

  Devereaux shook his head.

  “Everyone is gone,” she said.

  Devereaux shook his head again. He felt the sense of the others still around the house. Perhaps they were in the shed where they had taken Miki. Perhaps one or both of the big Czechs were outside now, having a cigarette.

  “Who are they?”

  “Cernan knew about you. Cernan knew you were coming after me.”

  She was a little angry now. “Dammit. I thought you were dead.”

  “Maybe I am,” he said.

  “Damn you,” she said. “Colonel Ready—”

  “Had me,” he finished. “Sold me. Sold the defector I was carrying across. To these men. Who have been sitting here a couple of days, waiting for something. And then you came along. So I think we’re going to know pretty soon.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Czech Secret Service. Come to take Miki back to Prague. He was the defector. The one I went after. The night I left you. And didn’t tell you.”

  “And what are they going to do with you?”

  “I thought they were going to kill me,” he said. He stared at her and touched her cheek with his hand. His touch was so gentle that she scarcely felt it. “I never thought I would see you again.” His words were as clumsy as his touch was sure. He could never tell her things because all the words sounded false to him, as though they had been used too many times by other people who did not mean them.

  “Dev.” Her voice caught. She wanted to crawl inside him, to wear his skin, to be so completely part of him that when he died, she died.

  They heard a sound on the porch outside the kitchen. Devereaux dropped his hands. He limped to the window. She made a sound and put her hand to her mouth.

  “They’re out there talking,” he said.

  “You limp like Ready. Like that terrible day in Lausanne he came to kill you.”

  “He hasn’t killed me yet.” The voice was flat and cold and the words didn’t comfort her.

  Cernan came into the dim room. He did not carry a gun. He looked at Rita, then at Devereaux.

  “You see?” Cernan said to Devereaux.

  Devereaux inclined his head. He understood.

  “I cannot stay in Belgium forever. If I go back to Prague, it is without you. If I go back to Prague, it is without this woman.”

  Devereaux said nothing. Rita crossed the room, reached for him. But now his body was set, cold, apart. She could not cling to him.

  “She loves you,” Cernan said.

  “And what do I do?” Devereaux said.

  “You understand?” Cernan said.

  “I think so.”

  “I have maybe two days. Maybe three days. Anna must be delivered safe, delivered by you here.”

  “I understand.”

  “If you cannot—”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  “I wish you no harm,” he said to both of them. “It is a way a matter must be done.”

  “Why does Henkin want contact with you?”

  Cernan stared, thought about it. He shrugged. “I think it is to kill Miki. That is what I think. That is why I think about Anna. I talk to Miki today.”

  “You were a long time in the shed,” Devereaux said.

  “It is not that Miki enjoys pain. He does not believe that I am authorized to inflict pain. It takes him a long time to understand this.”

  “What does he know?”

  Cernan grinned in the almost darkness. “Miki knows everything.”

  “And Anna. He knows about Anna.”

  “Yes. He told me that at last, about Anna and that Anna was my child. It was the last thing he told me. Could Henkin be aware of this as well? It has to be. It was why I was chosen to bring Miki back to Prague. Except I was not to bring Miki back at all. How do you order a murder? You hold out something that the murderer wants and you offer to give it to him if only he will kill. So the killer does the bidding of the man who has a prize. My child is the prize. I feel it in my bones. Henkin will want me to see that Miki does not return to Prague.”

  Rita broke in. “I’m a journalist, you can’t—”

  “Shut up. Please, I mean, shut up,” Cernan said. “You make the bargain for me and now I will buy the bargain.”

  And Rita shivered, touched Devereaux, felt the cold and unyielding body. “What bargain did you make?”

  “Your life for Anna’s freedom,” Devereaux said.

  Rita gasped. And then she hit him very hard in the face. Blood came to his lips. He looked at her and she hit him again with her fist. He didn’t move.

  Cernan said, “Do not do this, woman.”

  “I would have died for you,” she said.

  Devereaux said nothing to her. He stared at her and there was blood on his mouth. He didn’t wipe it away.

  “We watch you,” Cernan said. “From Brussels. And then you come to Bruges. I do not care about you, how close can you come to me? I tell him this. I say, ‘It does not matter to me. Colonel Ready will come after her, he inquires about her from the gentlemen in Club Tres, in a little while Colonel Ready takes her and that is nothing to me.’ I tell your man this thing to see what he will say, because everything is true, Rita Macklin. Colonel Ready knows you are in Bruges. In a little while, he has you. What does he want with you? But maybe you know. I think Devereaux knows.”

  And Cernan was smiling. Her fist was poised for another blow. She stared wildly at Devereaux’s impassive face and the trickle of blood on his lips, dripping down his chin.

  “That’s why you made the bargain with this man,” she said.

  Devereaux said nothing because all words lied or were misunderstood. He had wanted her to understand him when he held her a moment before and let his body flow into her body in a dirty farmhouse kitchen in the middle of this lost world. If she didn’t understand him then, he could never make it more plain to her.

  “There are clothes, your passport, the tickets,” Cernan said abruptly. “The night plane from London—”

  “All right,” Devereaux said, breaking his silence. He stepped away from Rita. “I don’t have a choice. Let me go, let her go. I will get Anna.”

  “Is that your word? Will you swear before the saints?”

  “On the Infant of Prague if you want,” Devereaux said.

  “No, I do not believe in saints or miracles or oaths.”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  “You signal the runner in Brussels and he will tell me the truth. You must have Anna and she must be alive.”

  “If she is dead—”

  “Then Rita is dead.”

  “She was never—”

  “She is dead in any case. Colonel Ready wants her as he wanted you. He is this close behind her. Only I
am a little more quick than he is. After you give me reason to be quick.” Cernan smiled and it was not pleasant. “You must bring me Anna and I will give you your life. And the life of this woman. It is more than a fair bargain.”

  Rita saw then the way it had been. She was going to be killed by Ready—or worse. And Devereaux would be dead as well and there was no hope for either of them. Unless he had made this bargain, this terrible understanding to trade a life for a life.

  “Dev.”

  He did not speak to her. He felt her reach for his hand and it was enough. He said to Cernan, “There can’t be a misunderstanding. A life for a life.”

  Cernan nodded.

  “No. No misunderstanding at all. I will find Anna and then you will show me that Rita is safe and alive and then we can complete… the bargain. But if you hurt her, I will hurt your daughter in the same way. If you kill her, I will kill Anna. Just so there is no misunderstanding.”

  Cernan shook his head slowly. “No. I have no illusions, American. You are brutal, a brutal people you come from. To kill is nothing to you, even an innocent child. You—”

  “Save it for your masters, Cernan,” Devereaux said. “I want you to understand because there’s no turning back. I will kill her if you harm Rita, and if you harm her, after your daughter is dead, I’ll come after you. I’ll kill you in the same way. I want you to understand there is no turning back once you do harm.”

  The words were finished and the silence was all that was left. Rita touched his hand again and this time he opened his hand and covered her hand in his palm and closed his hand. To keep her safe for a little while longer.

  23

  METHODS

  “We are preparing to close, sir.”

  “Really? What time is it?”

  “It is six in the morning, sir. It will be light in a few minutes. We close in the morning, sir. Can I call you a taxi? Would you like me to drive you back to your hotel, sir?”

  “I’m only staying at the Amigo, it’s just across the square.”

  “Perhaps we will see you in the evening?”

  “Do you always close about now, Philip? You and Jans?”